


Weight and Motion

by sevenfists



Series: Weight and Motion [1]
Category: Firefly, Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Originally Posted on LiveJournal, Podfic Available
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-05
Updated: 2006-12-05
Packaged: 2018-10-19 06:26:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10634154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenfists/pseuds/sevenfists
Summary: The pears were ripe, Kaylee told him, but Mal wouldn't eat any of them. They were a present, nestled all sweet and green in a wooden crate that a grateful passenger gave them right before they left her on Greenleaf.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Set post-movie. innie_darling and mcee worked their beta magic and made this so, so much better than it would have been without them. I cannot thank them enough. sanyin is so awesome that she managed to translate things like "Jesus Christ on a bicycle" into actual Chinese. ethrosdemon and danibennett looked at this when it was just a baby and provided invaluable words of wisdom.

**PART ONE**

The pears were ripe, Kaylee told him, but Mal wouldn't eat any of them. They were a present, nestled all sweet and green in a wooden crate that a grateful passenger gave them right before they left her on Greenleaf.

"She was just trying to be _nice_ ," Kaylee said, waggling a pear enticingly under Mal's nose. "Share some of her fancy things with us." She pushed the crate across the table toward Simon, who snagged a pear for himself.

"Maybe," Mal said, "but there's no part of her kindness I'm interested in partaking of." She'd reminded him too much of Inara, truth be told.

Kaylee rolled her eyes. "Are you still tetchy 'cause she asked if you're sly? There's no shame in that, Mal, sometimes you just can't tell about those things."

"I sure couldn't," Jayne said around the pear stem clamped between his front teeth. "First month I was on board, kept worryin' you was gonna ask me for a roll in the, uh, metaphysical hay."

"You did not," Simon said, staring at Jayne.

"My hand to God," Jayne said. "Locked my bunk every night. Not that there's anything wrong with you, Mal," he added. "Equipment just ain't right, you know."

Mal pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. There was a time when his crew used to respect him. He pushed his chair back from the table and stood up. "Soon as anyone feels like doing some actual work, I'll be down in the cargo bay," he said.

He could hear them giggling as he clomped down the corridor. Ship of gorram fools.

River was in the cockpit, one bare foot tucked up on the pilot's seat and the other pushing off against the floor, swiveling her chair in slow half-circles. "One week to Paquin," she said without turning to look at Mal. "Long way around."

One week to Paquin—five days, to be exact—and then another milk run, shuttling goods from one moon to another, nothing fancy. They'd been doing honest work lately, no smuggling—the Alliance was too busy trying to keep the population under control, stop the riots that had been springing up on every moon and planet, and it was easy to find work when Mal didn't have to worry about dodging the purple-bellies at every turn. Made a man nervous, though; fat living didn't last, and he'd been grinding his teeth since Miranda, waiting to see what would happen next.

Mal paused in the doorway, closing his mouth around his unasked question. "Well then," he said. "What about—"

"I _know_ ," River said. She punched a few buttons on the console.

"Right," Mal said. "Carry on, then." Girl would be running the ship, next thing he knew.

He headed down to the cargo bay. Things were quieter in recent months, with Book gone, and Wash, and Inara—Inara, who had kissed him like she had something to be sorry for, and then waltzed right off his ship and out of his life.

He still had Zoe, though—thinner, sadder, but otherwise much the same as always. "Zoe, you think I'm dispensable?"

"We would all be lost and dismayed without you, sir," Zoe said, not looking up from her inventory list.

"I get no respect," Mal said.

"Probably not, sir," Zoe said.

Mal huffed out a sigh. "What's the story on the cargo," he said.

"It's all here," Zoe said.

"Good. Don't much feel like goin' back to Greenleaf and killing that _hun dan_ Melville." Mal paused. "You hear that?"

It happened so quickly that Mal could hardly process what was going on. A rumbling noise, like an engine starting up, came from the middle of the cargo bay. There was a pulse of light, a blue flash, and then the air _split_ somehow, like a seam ripping open, and a man came stumbling out of the breach, clutching a pistol.

Mal had his gun in his hand in a split second. Beside him, he heard Zoe cocking the hammer on her own gun.

"Don't move," Zoe barked.

The man blinked at them, opened his mouth, and pitched face-forward onto the deck. Behind him, the air rippled and closed.

"Well," Mal said, feeling a bit startled.

Zoe holstered her gun. "You said it, sir."

"You saw that too, right? I ain't losin' my mind?"

"I saw it," Zoe said.

Mal crouched down beside their unexpected guest. He was more of a boy, really: good-looking; smooth face freckled and dusted with a faint stubble, but a hard set to his mouth that didn't vanish even in unconsciousness. Outlandish clothing, too, and a pistol that looked fairly ordinary but had grips made out of some material Mal had never seen, pale and iridescent. He gave the boy a swift pat-down and came up with six knives, some strange mechanical device, and what, after a cautious taste-test, turned out to be a canister of salt.

"Go get Jayne and the doc," he said to Zoe.

Simon came with his black case, Jayne trailing in after him, still chewing on his pear stem.

"Where'd ya get the dead guy?" Jayne asked.

"He ain't dead," Mal said.

Simon knelt down and pulled a scanner out of his bag. "He's definitely not dead," he said, running the scanner over the boy's body.

"Let's get him to med bay," Mal said.

He and Jayne carried the boy down, Mal's hands tucked in the boy's armpits and Jayne hoisting him by the knees. They stripped off his jacket, strapped him down on the med bay table and let Simon get to work.

"All his vitals are normal," Simon said, watching the read-outs on his medical gadgets. "I'm going to run a full genetic scan on him, but that's going to take a while."

"We got time," Mal said. "You go upstairs now, keep the girls out of the way."

Simon frowned. "I don't—"

"Did I ask you to argue with me? Do it. And take Jayne with you."

"Hey, why do I gotta go?" Jayne complained.

"Because I said so," Mal snapped.

They went, Jayne grumbling and Simon casting dark glances at Mal. Boy was so over-protective of his patients—a good quality, Mal supposed, but irritating.

"Well," Zoe said.

"What should we do with him?" Mal asked.

"It's up to you, sir," Zoe said.

"I'm askin' for your opinion," Mal said.

Zoe shrugged. "Space him."

"You think?" Mal looked at the boy, the freckles across the bridge of his nose, the pale undersides of his forearms resting against the table. He didn't look particularly dangerous at the moment—but he'd been carrying a gun and six knives, and the calluses on his hands said he knew how to use them.

"Sir," Zoe said, voice hard. "Last thing we need is some stranger causing trouble on this boat."

"He ain't exactly in a position to do much harm," Mal said. "Was a time you would've argued for givin' him whatever help we could."

"Was a time," Zoe agreed.

Mal crossed his arms and frowned at the motionless body on the table. Plain truth of it was, he was curious. He wanted to know how the boy had come to be on Mal's boat, and whether it was a trick more unsavory types might be figuring out for themselves. "We should ask him some questions," Mal said. "See if this is something other folk might know how to do. Best to be prepared."

"Of course," Zoe said, but the narrow press of her mouth meant she thought Mal had lost his mind.

"If he was plannin' on running amok and killing people, River would've said something by now."

"You going to trust that, sir?" Zoe asked.

"No reason not to," Mal said. "River don't lead us astray too often."

"She could have missed something this time," Zoe said. "Girl doesn't always say everything that's on her mind, either." Her hand was resting on her revolver, casual, like she wasn't even aware she was doing it. Probably she wasn't.

"Well, I'm willin' to take that chance," Mal said. He punched the button on the intercom. "Simon to med bay."

Simon came rattling down the stairs, hair disheveled. "Are you going to send me right upstairs again? Because if so, I—"

"No complaining," Mal said.

The boy was still limp on the examining table, hands dangling over the sides. They all looked at him for a moment, watched the steady rise and fall of his chest.

"You want me to wake him?" Simon asked.

Mal pulled out his pistol and aimed it at the boy's head. "Do it."

Simon gave him a dark look, but nonetheless pressed a hypo to the boy's neck, and the boy's body spasmed, his limbs pushing against the restraints.  His eyes snapped open. "Sam," he gasped.

Mal pointed his gun right between the boy's eyes. "Who are you and how the _shen-sheng de gao-wan_ did you end up on my boat?"

The boy ignored him. "Where the hell is my brother," he grated out, his eyes darting around the room, his lips pulled back from his teeth in an animal grimace.

"Your who?" Mal asked.

"Fuck you," the boy said, wriggling against the straps, "I know you've got him, where the hell is Sam."

Mal spoke to Zoe without looking away from the boy. "We got two mysteriously-appearing folk on this boat?"

"Just the one, as far as I know," Zoe said.

"That's what I thought," Mal said. "Don't know who this brother of yours is, boy, but we surely don't have him."

"Don't fuckin' lie to me," the boy snarled, "you crazy-ass psychos, where _is_ he?"

"Are you somehow missin' the fact that I got a pistol aimed at your face?" Mal asked. "I'm the one askin' the questions here."

"You aren't going to shoot me," the boy said.

"That's a hard bet to make, someone in your position," Mal said, and flipped off the safety. Zoe tensed beside him, a silent and watchful presence.

The kid narrowed his eyes. "Guess I don't have much of a choice," he said. He stopped struggling, finally, and lay still against the bench.

"That's right," Mal said. "You tell me how you got on my boat."

The boy raised his eyebrows. "Your what? We're on a boat?"

"Simon," Mal said, "maybe you'd best go check on Kaylee."

Simon said, "I don't—"

Mal cut him off. "Do it." He waited until Simon was clattering up the stairs to the upper deck, then leaned over the table, his face close to the boy's and his pistol digging into the soft skin under the boy's jaw. "You listen real close," he said. "I have a crew put their lives in my hands, and if riddling your body full of bullets is what I have to do to keep them safe, don't think I'll hesitate."

"Do I look dangerous to you?" the boy asked. "Strapped down on this table? You think I'm going to kill anybody?"

"I seen some strange things in my life," Mal said, "but seeing you appear out of _thin air_ has got to be one of the strangest. Now you tell me how that happened, or the doc's gonna be cleaning your blood off these walls for weeks."

"I don't know," the boy said. "You think I want to be here? You think this is some sort of diabolical plan to take over your, uh, your _boat_?"

"You don't know," Mal repeated, drawling it out slow and sarcastic. "You appear on my ship like some sort of...freaky appearing thing and you don't know how that happened?"

"Basically, yeah," the boy said.

Mal straightened up and turned to Zoe. "Boy says he don't know how he came to grace us with his presence," he said.

"I _don't_ ," the boy said.

" _Bi zui_ ," Mal snapped, head whipping around.

The kid raised an eyebrow. "Bee what?"

Mal glanced over at Zoe. She tilted her head toward the kid, questioning. " _Ta hao xiang ting bu dong_ ," she said.

"I think you may be right," Mal replied. He spoke to the kid. "I said shut up. That clear enough for you?"

"Maybe you'd better say it again," the kid said. "Just to make sure."

"What's your name," Mal said.

The boy hesitated. "Dean," he said finally

"You got a last name, or you plan on having us all sit around and play guessing games?"

"Dean Winchester. Look, can we talk about this _after_ you unstrap me from the table? I'm gonna have bruises on my lily-white ass, and that just isn't fun for anybody."

It wasn't often that Mal held a gun to a man's head and wasn't met with some approximation of fear. He lowered his pistol and flipped the safety back on. "Zoe, put him out," he said.

Zoe stepped forward and cracked the butt of her gun against the boy's forehead, and he went limp.

"Well," Mal said. "Looks like we got ourselves a little situation." He rubbed his forehead. "All right. Get the crew together."

They gathered in the kitchen, sitting around the kitchen table—the whole crew, even Simon, who'd given the stranger an extra shot to keep him passed out.

"As I'm sure you are all aware of by now, we have ourselves an unexpected guest on this boat," Mal said to their upturned faces. "I'm thinkin' we should keep him around for a bit, find out how he managed to get himself on here and see if there's anything we ought to be doin' about that."

"When do I get to see him?" Kaylee asked. "I bet he's real nice."

"Should I be worried?" Simon asked, and Kaylee leaned over and smacked his arm.

"Children," Mal said warningly. "Now, River's said he don't have any sort of murderin'-type ideas on his mind, or at least none past killin' us all because he thinks we've got his brother. We don't got his brother, and he'll learn that soon enough, and then there shouldn't be any need for violence. That's good enough for me, but if any of you think otherwise, well, speak now."

Zoe crossed her arms.

"Zoe thinks we should space him," Mal added, feeling contrary.

"Awww, Zoe, but we like new people!" Kaylee said.

"We do?" Zoe asked, eyebrows raised. She was the same as Mal, didn't trust the uneasy ceasefire they had with the Alliance. Mal couldn't blame her; he'd just as well keep unnecessary folk off his ship, avoid entanglements—except for this time, apparently.

"I like the spacin' idea," Jayne said. "Who else votes for spacin'?" He raised his hand and looked around. Nobody else raised theirs, and Jayne dropped his hand back onto the table with a loud thump.

"No spacing," River said firmly, and then four people started talking at once and Mal could barely hear himself think.

" _Bi zui_!" he barked, and they all fell silent, looking abashed. "All right," he said. "I'm still captain, last I checked, and I say we wake him up and see what he's got to say for himself. Might be he could make himself useful before we dump him at the nearest port."

"Maybe he's from somewhere exciting," Kaylee said wistfully. "I bet he's got all kinds of stories!"

Mal sighed. "Well, that may be the case, but—"

"I could space him," Jayne said. "I'm good at spacin'."

"We're not spacing him," Mal snapped.

"I was just sayin'," Jayne grumbled.

"You're abominable," Simon said.

"Next person who says a word gets locked in their quarters for a week," Mal said. "Simon, Zoe, you're with me in med bay. The rest of you go—do something." He turned on his heel and headed for med bay.

Simon fluttered over the boy—Dean—checking readouts and wires and whatnot, all that fancy medical gadgetry Mal knew nothing about. "The scan's finished," Simon said.

"So? What's it say?" Mal asked.

"Well—nothing so far," Simon said, his eyes flickering over the screen. "But—oh, that's very strange."

"What," Mal said. He glanced over at Zoe. She looked back at him, inscrutable.

"He's carrying the recessive gene for cystic fibrosis," Simon said.

"For who?" Mal said.

"Exactly," Simon said. "We corrected it out of the population more than four hundred years ago."

"So he's from some backwater colony that don't have gene tech," Mal said.

"No," Simon said. "Nobody's had this gene since Earth-That-Was."

***

When Dean woke up for the second time, he wasn't strapped to the table anymore. The same two people were in the room with him—the guy who'd been interrogating him, and the scary-looking woman with the gun. Dean rubbed his eyes and sat up.

"What year is it," said the guy.

Dean blinked. "2007, last I heard." He glanced around the room, looking for—but Sam wasn't here; Dean had read that from the complete what-the-fuck confusion on the faces of his delightful companions. Whatever bizarre-ass place this was, Dean had come to it alone.

The guy looked at the woman, and she twitched her eyebrow in a way that Dean couldn't read. "Huh. Ain't that somethin'," the guy said. "What do you make of that, Zoe?"

"I couldn't say, sir," the woman said.

Zoe, then. And whoever this guy was that she called "sir."

"It's February 2519," the guy said. "You're either crazy or a long way from home, and damned if I can say which one it is."

"Crazy, I hope," Dean said, and he wouldn't say anything after that, even when Zoe pointed her gun right in his face.

The first night, he didn't sleep.

They tossed him in a room and left him there with a bottle of water and a painful knot on his head from where Zoe had pistol-whipped him. The door looked like paper, but when he tried to kick his foot through it, it didn't even bend.

He could hear the whirring of the ship's engine, steady as a heartbeat. He'd been on a boat a time or two, but only the kind you could see either end of sitting down—not anything as big as this, so big that he couldn't even feel the motion of the water, and only a slight sense of vertigo told him that he was moving at all.

He wrapped his hand around his amulet, squeezing until it left divots in the skin of his palm. Sam would find a way to get him back. Hell, for all Dean knew, this was some sort of crazy spell-induced illusion, and tomorrow morning he'd wake up in Bumfuck, North Dakota.

It had felt like old magic, though, whatever it was they'd stumbled into. Dark. Deep-rooted. Dean remembered Sam's anguished face, a sense of something pulling him away, and then a long time of blackness. And then he was on a _boat_. In the _future_.

Or he was hallucinating. Or these people were all crazy. Maybe _he_ was crazy.

He couldn't sleep. He got out of bed and did push-ups on the floor until his arms gave out, then lay there for hours, staring up at the curving line of the ceiling.

"You'd better come get me, Sam," he murmured, and that was how he knew he was _really_ losing it, talking to himself. His knives were gone, and his gun, and Dad's journal. If Sam didn't do something, he would be _stuck_ there, wherever he was, inside his own head or in some pool of bad magic. He'd been in rough situations before, but nothing like this.

Sam would get him out. There wasn't an alternative. Sam would get him and they'd laugh about this over some beers.

At some point, the guy in charge came in and stood over Dean with a pistol and a grim set to his jaw.

"Get up," the guy said said, and Dean got.

The guy tried to feed him breakfast, but Dean wasn't having any of that. "How do I know you aren't gonna poison me?"

"You don't," the guy said. He set a bowl down in front of Dean anyway, laid a fork next to it. It looked like rice and tofu, which sealed the deal as far as Dean was concerned—even if it wasn't poisoned, no _way_ was he eating that shit.

The guy sat down across the table from Dean and started eating. He was using chopsticks, which was kind of weird, but everything about the situation was so fucking bizarre that Dean was willing to ignore a little cutlery-related strangeness.

The ship was quiet. Dean didn't know if it was really early or really late—he was assuming it was morning, but he didn't really know—or if everybody was just avoiding him. "You gonna tell me your name?" he asked.

The guy paused, staring at him, chopsticks halfway to his mouth. "Mal Reynolds," he said. "I'm captain of this boat."

Captain, huh—that explained it, then, the way he bossed Zoe around, who looked like she didn't take orders from many people. Mal wasn't bad-looking, but there was a hard edge to him that Dean saw in himself, sometimes, when he slipped up and forgot to keep himself from looking for it.

"We'll be on Paquin in a week," Mal said. "You can probably find work there. There's people who won't ask too many questions, and it seems to me you're the sort who could use that kind of generosity."

Dean didn't know what the hell Paquin was, but he wasn't about to ask. "Yeah, sure," he said. "Paquin, work, got it."

Mal looked at him for another moment and then went back to his food. Dean's stomach growled uncomfortably. It didn't matter—he'd be back with Sam long before he starved to death.

Mal got up and took his bowl over to the sink. "Come on," he said.

"Where are we going?"

"Got some things I'm curious about," Mal said. He led Dean down a corridor, and up a flight of stairs, and Dean froze in the doorway then, stunned into motionlessness by the sight of a vast darkness through the window, punctuated here and there with tiny lights, like a city seen from far away.

"You okay?" Mal asked, and Dean bent over at the waist and vomited all over the floor.

He fell to one side, curling up on the floor. His eyes felt too big for their sockets, and his mouth felt swollen, his tongue acid and dry. He crossed his arms and tucked his cold hands into his armpits. The floor was swaying beneath his face, a slow side-to-side motion, and Jesus Christ, when Mal had said "boat" he hadn't meant _boat_ , he'd meant motherfucking _spaceship_.

It was like an airplane, only a million times worse. Dean stared at the pipes on the wall and thought about vomiting again. His stomach cramped up.

"The hell is wrong with him!" Mal snapped, but it was a distant noise, unimportant.

Someone touched his face with cool hands. It was a girl, slender and dark-haired. "You're a long way from home," she said, echoing what Mal had said the day before.

"Uh, yeah," Dean croaked, his throat raw. "Yeah, I guess you could say that."

The girl looked up at Mal. "He won't throw up again," she said. "He didn't know that we're in space."

"You're goddamn right I didn't," Dean said. His breath was coming too quickly, sour and hot—he knew it, he felt himself panicking, but he couldn't do a damn thing about it. If Sam had been there—if Sam—

Dean shut his eyes and rubbed a clammy hand over his face. He couldn't think about it.

"I'm River," the girl said.

"Not now," Mal said. "I need to call the doc?"

"No," Dean said. "No, I'm okay."

"Good," Mal said. He crouched down and cupped one hand around Dean's elbow. "Get up."

Mal levered Dean into a chair in front of a computer console and bent over him to touch the screen, his fingers hitting the boxes that lit up, one by one, in some sequence Dean couldn't follow. "There," Mal said, pointing to what looked like a map of a solar system. "You know any of these planets?"

"No," Dean said. "Venus, Saturn, Earth, yeah. Not these."

"Earth," Mal said.

Dean took a deep breath. "Uh, yeah. You know, big, blue, lots of water."

"Huh," Mal said. He tapped the screen again and it went dark. Dean kept his eyes on it, afraid to glance away and see out the window again, look at all that space outside, heavy and pressing in. Mal pulled something out of his jacket and set it down in front of Dean—it was Dad's journal, and the canister of salt that Dean'd had tucked in the waistband of his pants.

Dean clenched his jaw and said nothing.

"You got an explanation for this?" Mal asked. He opened the journal and started flipping through it. "Demons, werewolves, _tian xiao de_ —this some sort of joke?"

"It's all real," Dean said. He thought about throwing up again, this time all over Mal's boots. "You don't believe me, fine. No skin off my ass."

Mal looked over at the girl, River; Dean could see the movement of his head but not the look that passed between them. He didn't care. He wasn't the crazy one in this situation. Jesus Christ, a _spaceship_ , and his heart was still beating in his chest like a fist was squeezing it, so tight it might burst.

"And the salt?" Mal asked.

"Repels spirits," Dean said. "Ghosts, whatnot." He ground the heel of his hand into his chest.

"Huh," Mal said again. "River, you watch him. Need to talk to Zoe." He left the room, clomping back down the stairs.

Dean took his chances and glanced at River. She stared back at him, face expressionless. Behind her, Dean could see stars, a glowing thing nearby that might have been a planet—

He turned back around, staring at the dark screen in front of him until he felt a little less like he was about to blow chunks all over the room. Mal had left Dad's journal sitting there on the counter. Dean grabbed it and stuck it in his waistband, pulled his t-shirt down to cover it. He didn't know where his jacket was.

He touched the screen, not expecting anything to happen, but it flashed to life, displaying the same map that Mal had called up. There were planets and moons arranged in concentric circles, all of them labeled both in English and something Dean couldn't identify, maybe Chinese, and he stared at it, helpless, an entire unknown universe wheeling in slow animated circles before his eyes.

_Sam's gonna love this,_ he thought, and then had to bite his tongue against the sharp noise that rose in his throat, more painful than bile.

Mal came back with another man, a huge burly guy with a goatee and a real fucking bad attitude, and they hauled him back to the same room he'd spent the night in. Dean didn't even fight them; couldn't, really; he was too busy trying not to freak the fuck out and vomit or black out or beg them for mercy.

They dumped him on the bed and left. Mal turned in the doorway and said, "Don't cause trouble or I'll let Jayne deal with you."

Dean turned his face to the wall and didn't answer. He heard the door slide shut and lock. He didn't know what time it was. He was hungry. He got off the bed and paced around the room, feeling the walls, looking for any weak points, any ways to get out. There weren't any.

The air tasted flat, metallic. Like it had been recycled over and over, pumped through the same ducts, breathed into the same lungs, for days and days on end.

His head reeled. He slapped his palm against the bulkhead, unthinking, and then did it again; then he balled his hand into a fist and punched the wall as hard as he could, over and over, until his knuckles split open again and bled all over the floor, until something popped in his hand and he couldn't make a fist anymore.

They came back for him later—three pairs of boots; Dean didn't look up, just hunched over even more, sitting there on the bed. His mouth was bitter, still ripe with bile. He was filthy, crusted with sweat, and his jeans had blood spots on them, little spatters like Braille.

"All right, boy," someone said—Mal; it sounded like him, anyway. "We're—"

"Look at his hand." Zoe.

A pause. "Call the doc," Mal said. The third pair of boots left the room. Dean picked at the fraying hem of his jeans with his left hand. His right hand was swollen, bruised, smeared with drying red-brown blood.

He looked up when the door opened again. It was the dark-haired guy who'd been in the infirmary the night before; apparently he was the doctor or something.

"This is Simon," Mal said. Dean didn't look at him.

Simon knelt on the floor in front of Dean and opened his black case. "I'll need to see your hand," he said.

Dean felt sparse inside, hollowed-out. His ears were ringing. He sat there and let Simon examine him and tried to ignore the throbbing pain in his knuckles.

"It's nothing I can't fix," Simon said. "He'll have to come to the infirmary, though."

"I think we can manage," Mal said, and he and Jayne hustled Dean down the corridors, Jayne's unfriendly hand planted firm between Dean's shoulder blades.

They all asked him questions, but even if Dean had wanted to answer them, his mouth was slack and uncooperative.

Sam would come get him. He let Simon do something to his hand—"let," as if he had any choice in the matter—he wasn't sure what; but the pain ebbed. Simon kept casting unreadable looks in Mal's direction, his mouth set in an unhappy line. Dean could guess at what he was thinking, but it was only a guess, and Dean had never been hot shit at reading people. It was something Sam—

Dean looked at the fabric of his jeans and waited for Simon to finish.

They hauled him back to his room, after. Dean was happy to go. Simon must have given him a sleeping pill or something, because he passed out as soon as they dumped him on the bed.

***

"So he's from Earth-That-Was?" Jayne asked, scratching the underside of his chin with the knife he was busy sharpening.

"Looks like," Mal said, and shoveled more rice into his mouth. They'd have to buy some more pickled beets when they landed on Paquin—breakfast just wasn't the same without them.

"Huh," Jayne said. "Ain't all that time-travel stuff, you know, made up?"

"It's supposed to be," Simon said.

"Boy's telling the truth," Mal said. "It don't add up, otherwise." The planets he'd named, the way he talked, his gun, the medical stuff Simon had done—Mal didn't know how else to explain any of it. It was as outlandish a notion as he'd ever considered, but he was inclined to believe it.

"So what's all this...ghost business?" Simon asked.

Mal shrugged. "Beats me. Boy sure seems to think it's real, though."

Jayne stopped chewing and let his mouth hang open. "What're you talkin' about ghosts for?"

"Close your mouth, Jayne, ain't none of us want to see that. Apparently Dean's a professional ghost-hunter," Mal said.

"Or else he's crazy," Simon said.

"Or else he's crazy," Mal agreed.

"Hell, I don't wanna mess around with no ghosts!" Jayne said. "My cousin Mandy got a ghost-hauntin' once, back on Delphiria, and it took the preacher two weeks and a whole gorram lot of trouble to get rid of that thing."

Simon gave Jayne a disbelieving look. "You actually believe in that stuff? Ghosts and night haunts? Those are children's tales, Jayne."

"Ain't just tales," Jayne said stubbornly. "And ain't just ghosts, neither. One of my sisters got possessed, maybe fifteen years back. All pukin' and talkin' nonsense. It ended up killin' her."

"Is that so," Mal said. "What did they—"

Kaylee came clattering into the kitchen, still pinning up her hair. "Morning!" she said, and kissed Simon on the cheek on her way to the coffee pot.

"Well ain't you just a little ray of sunshine," Jayne said.

"It's one of the benefits of getting a decent night's sleep," Simon said. "I recommend it."

"Might be easier if certain people weren't humping at all hours of the night," Jayne said.

" _Jayne_ ," Mal said. Man couldn't even eat his breakfast in peace. He glared at Kaylee as she poured out the last of the coffee. He'd had his eye on that last cup, and he surely didn't feel like making a fresh pot.

He got up, took his dishes to the sink. "Where's Zoe?"

"Cargo bay, I think," Simon said.

Mal didn't go to the cargo bay—he went down to the passenger dorms instead, stood in the doorway of the kid's room and watched him: he was passed out on the bed, all doped up and drooling a little, looking innocent as a little baby lamb.

Mal had thought about being worried or angry, but it turned out he was just really gorram irritated. If people wanted to make his life difficult, he wished they would at least have the decency to not do it through _time-travel_. And especially to not talk all kinds of nonsense about ghosts and werewolves. Mal knew the kid had taken the notebook back, but he was just as glad of it—he didn't want that thing sitting in his bunk any longer, staring back at him like it might bite.

Dean didn't seem to want to be on the ship any more than Mal wanted him there, though. The way he'd been sick in the cockpit the day before, and the way he'd kept screaming when he woke up in the night, before Simon sedated him again—it made Mal think he'd been right to not space the boy. Seemed he had a lot more on his mind than thieving Mal's boat or whatnot, and cold-blooded murder wasn't something Mal wanted to make a habit of.

Mal rubbed his face. He wasn't sure what to do, and it didn't sit right with him. On the one hand, he didn't owe the boy a gorram thing; he could drop him on Paquin and sail off with a clear conscience. On the other—well, Mal was curious, and he recognized the sheer desperation he'd seen on Dean's face the day before—he'd seen it on enough other faces, both during the war and after it. It was a look you didn't turn away from easily.

Mal was getting soft in the head. Six years ago, he'd have spaced the kid without a second thought. Six months ago, he wouldn't even have had a _first_ thought. But that was before Book, and Wash, and Inara—three people gone from Mal's life, and they left holes, deep wounds that hadn't filled in yet. Was a time he didn't need anybody. People left or died and he barely noticed.

He heaved out a sigh and went up to the cargo bay to fuss at Zoe for a while.

Simon called him on the intercom a while later, and Mal went down to med bay to have a look-see. Through the observation window, he saw Dean sitting on the table, looking a little disoriented but not too much worse for the wear. Simon was fluttering around him, all fancy gadgets and no good sense.

Mal poked his head through the door. "He awake?"

"He's talking about elephants, so not completely," Simon said, not looking away from whatever readout he was examining. "The effects of the drug should wear off soon."

Mal hesitated. "Aren't elephants a myth?"

"So is Earth-That-Was, according to most people," Simon said.

"Good point," Mal said. "Send him up to the cargo bay soon as he's walking. I want a few words with him."

"It might be a few minutes," Simon said.

"I'm a patient man," Mal said.

Simon gave Mal the same look River gave him, sometimes—like she thought he had lost his ever-loving mind. "That you are, Captain."

Mal scowled and went back up to the cargo bay.

"I'm still not letting you touch anything, sir," Zoe said.

"Right, of course," Mal said. "I'll just sit over here and, uh."

"You can make the grocery list," Zoe offered.

A wise woman, his first mate. Mal wrote down "pickled beets" and "reconstituted protein," and then gave up and thought about the kid and watched Zoe take inventory of all the various empty and mostly-empty crates that were sitting around taking up space.

Dean wandered in, running a hand through his hair. "You wanted to see me," he said.

"Yeah," Mal said. He was interested in the kid's body language—Dean didn't sit down, and he didn't face Mal full-on; he stayed a little turned toward the back of the cargo bay, facing the door. He'd seen combat, obviously—maybe not military service, but something. "Look, boy—"

"I'm not a boy," Dean said, frowning. "I'm twenty-eight."

Mal gritted his teeth. "That's not the point." He rubbed a hand over his face, feeling on edge—something about the boy unsettled him, made him angry. "Until we land on Paquin, you stay out of trouble. No wandering around, no touching things you ain't supposed to, and no makin' me angry, _dong ma_?"

"Whatever," Dean said.

"Don't think I'm not serious," Mal said. "I don't rightly know why you're here, but I surely don't trust you, and it won't take much before certain folk on my crew go lookin' for an excuse to slit your throat in the night."

"I'm terrified," Dean said. "Can I go now?"

" _No_ ," Mal said. He watched as Zoe went up the stairs toward the cockpit. He wasn't sure what else he wanted to say to Dean, but he didn't want to leave things as they stood, with Dean cocky and barely paying attention to Mal. Jayne had been the same way, early on, but Mal had broken him of it soon enough. Sort of.

He heard a noise, then, and turned to see Kaylee and River chasing each other down one of the catwalks. River had her skirt scooped up in both hands, making a little bowl. Mal cursed under his breath. "Girls! Get down from there!" he bellowed.

"I have them all!" River called, sounding delighted, and ran lightly down the steps. She stopped in front of Mal, breathless. Her skirt was filled with pears.

Kaylee was just a few steps behind, and she grabbed River's shoulders, wrapped her arms around the other girl. "Make her give them back," she said to Mal, her face flushed, eyes sparkling.

Mal cast a worried glance at Dean, and sure enough, the boy was transfixed. _Ta ma de_. "Both of you, _out_ ," Mal ordered. "Get."

They got, casting glances over their shoulders and giggling, leaning into each other. Mal rolled his eyes. He was glad they were friends—it was good for River, and for Kaylee, too—but two energetic girls on a tiny ship was too much for Mal's nerves.

Dean ran a hand over his head, staring after them.

"You touch either of those girls, I will put you out the airlock," Mal growled.

Dean smirked. "What about Zoe?"

"You touch Zoe, I'll let her do the honors herself," Mal said, and walked away before his fist made acquaintance with the boy's jaw.

He didn't see Dean again until dinner that night. Kaylee and Jayne were cooking something—Jayne, surprisingly, could throw together a decent meal as long as somebody kept an eye on him and told him exactly what to do—and when Mal followed the scent of it into the kitchen, Dean was sitting there at the table, trading vicious scowls with Simon.

Mal covered his smile with one hand. It didn't surprise him at all that those two had taken a disliking to each other, especially with the way Dean had been looking at Kaylee earlier.

"Mal, come try this soup," Jayne said. "It don't taste right."

"It tastes _fine_ ," Kaylee said, and whacked Jayne with the spoon she was holding.

Mal went over to the stove and took the spoon Jayne offered him. "Needs more rosemary," he said.

"Can't have a good soup without rosemary," Jayne agreed.

"Shepherd Book would be happy to know you listened to him about something," Zoe said wryly. "Preacher sure knew how to cook."

River came gliding into the room, a half-eaten pear in one hand. "The rice is going to burn," she said.

"Oh no!" Kaylee gasped, whirling around and punching frantically at various buttons on the rice-cooker.

Mal leaned against the counter and watched Dean watching the crew. Dean's face was inscrutable, but Mal could see the way his eyes darted, following the flow of conversation as Kaylee teased Simon and River set the table and Jayne talked to himself about the rosemary. It was nothing Mal hadn't heard a thousand times before, but Dean sat motionless, pulled in on himself, like a man who wasn't used to being around so many noisy people.

Mal cursed himself for a fool. He'd lost his mind, wondering about what sort of life Dean had led before. Pointless nonsense. Wasn't anything he needed to know or cared to.

"Come eat," Kaylee said, offering him a bowl of rice. "Soup's ready."

The soup was good—rosemary and protein and canned vegetables that were somehow flavorful and not at all soggy. Kaylee had a good touch with cooking, and she'd make Simon a fine wife once he got around to asking her.

"You're from Earth-That-Was," River said, and Mal devoted himself to eating. He wanted no part of this conversation.

"Yeah," Dean said. He held his chopsticks awkwardly, gripping too close to the points. Mal wondered who'd decided to give him chopsticks instead of a fork. Probably Jayne, wanting someone else at the table who looked as stupid as he did.

"What's it like?" Kaylee asked, eyes all wide and glowy.

Dean paused, rapped his chopsticks against the edge of his bowl. "Not like this," he said finally.

Jayne snorted. "You actually believe all them pretty lies he's been telling you? Earth-That-Was don't exist."

"Well, it _did_ ," Kaylee said stubbornly.

"It did," River said. "I looked. The Alliance has charts. It was very far away."

"Sure, listen to the crazy girl," Jayne said.

" _Jayne_ ," Simon said warningly.

"Jayne likes to think about Vera while he touches himself," River announced.

Zoe made a noise that sounded suspiciously like laughter.

"That ain't true!" Jayne protested.

"I'd be willing to believe it," Simon said.

"Who's Vera?" Dean asked.

There was a pause. "Jayne's favorite gun," Simon said at last.

Zoe covered her eyes with one hand and laughed like Mal hadn't heard in months.

"My ship is full of crazy people," Mal said.

"Which is exactly how you like it," Zoe said, and she was loose around the eyes and even smiling a little. Something in Mal's chest eased slightly, to see her like that.

"Pass the soup," Jayne said, and belched loudly. Simon leaned over the table to swat at him; Kaylee braided River's hair; Dean watched all of it, and Mal watched Dean and the stubborn line of his jaw, his crooked nose, and the way his eyes crinkled when he half-smiled at Jayne's protestations.

_Soft in the head_ , Mal thought, and got up to take his dishes to the sink.

***

Dean had a split second of panic when he woke up, but he tamped it down fast. It was getting easier. The ship was large enough that he could do a pretty good job of convincing himself that he wasn't on a flying death-trap in outer space, as long as he stayed away from the cockpit.

The hard part was convincing himself that he wasn't looking for Sam—turning his head and opening his mouth to say something before he remembered that Sam wasn't there.

He'd been wearing the same clothes since Tuesday, in South Dakota. He didn't know what day it was anymore.

He went up to the kitchen. Jayne was seated at the table, eating..something, and he grunted when Dean came in.

"Rice in the cooker," he said.

"I could really go for some Honey Nut Cheerios," Dean said.

Jayne stared at him, mouth open, chewing.

"Fuckin'. Never mind," Dean said, and dished himself out a bowl of rice.

He sat at the table for a long time after he finished eating, after Jayne burped loudly and wandered off, after River came through and handed him a pear. Dad's journal was down in the room they'd put him in, half-hidden beneath the mattress, but Dean had spent hours going through it the day before, and there was nothing in it that could help him.

He had to count on Sam to come rescue him. And Sam couldn't do that if he didn't know where Dean was. Which meant Dean had to stay on the boat.

Which meant he had to convince Mal that it would be a good idea to let him stay.

"Son of a bitch," Dean muttered, and rubbed a hand over his face.

He was still sitting there when Kaylee came in, her arms full of engine parts. "Hello," she said, smiling at him. There was a streak of grease across her forehead.

"Hey," Dean said, leaning back in his chair. She was cute, but not really his type, and anyway he'd seen the way Simon looked at her—like he'd break Dean's neck if he tried anything. Dean could take Simon any day of the week, but it wasn't worth the trouble.

A little flirting never hurt anybody, though. Dean tilted his chin up and smirked, and watched Kaylee turn pink. "Whatcha got there, sweetheart?"

"Oh, the left re-breaker coil's been makin' some _qi guai de_ noises lately, but I think I can rig it up to the combustion cable and make it stop," Kaylee said.

"Uh-huh," Dean said, still grinning at her. "You want any help? I happen to know a thing or two about engines."

"Oh!" Kaylee said. "Oh, uh. Well! Sure! You can hand me my tools."

Playing go-fer wasn't really what Dean had in mind, but it'd keep him busy for a while, at least. "Yeah, sure," he said. "Sounds super."

Kaylee ignored the sarcasm in his voice and beamed happily.

It turned out that spaceship engines weren't a goddamn thing like car engines. Dean lay on the floor, halfway beneath the engine,  and listened attentively while Kaylee pointed out wires and tubing and God only knew what.

It seemed like the whole thing was based on internal combustion, and Dean thought he could figure it out with a few hours and a good wrench. He wasn't sure Kaylee would want him messing around with her engine, though.

"Okay," Dean said, "show me this re-breaker thing you were talking about."

There were footsteps in the hallway a while later, but Dean didn't pay any attention to the noise, too absorbed in watching Kaylee hook the stop-valve to the median strip.

"Dean," Mal said, and Dean hit his head on the engine.

Kaylee giggled.

"Fuck," Dean muttered, and squirmed out from underneath the engine, stood up.

Mal was standing holding a bunch of clothes. He raised his eyebrows. "Kaylee, he been bothering you?"

"Not one bit, Cap'n," Kaylee said. Dean couldn't see anything of her but her legs from the knees down. "I was showin' him how to fix that busted re-breaker coil."

Mal glared at Dean. "He don't really need to know how to do that, Kaylee."

"Dean, don't you pay him any mind," Kaylee said, "he's been grumpy like this since Inara left."

"I have— _Kaylee_!"

"Who's Inara?" Dean asked.

" _Nobody_ ," Mal snapped. "Quit askin' so many gorram questions."

Dean crossed his arms and returned Mal's scowl.

"All right, come on, then," Mal said, and stomped off down the corridor.

Dean followed him down the stairs to the passenger dorms, and then into the room he'd been sleeping in. Mal dumped the stuff he was carrying on the bed and stepped back.

"What is this?" Dean asked.

"It's for you," Mal said. "You're about the same size as me and Simon. Figured you might need some clean clothes."

Dean sifted through the pile—old, soft pants and worn shirts, a few t-shirts like the kind Jayne wore. "Uh. Thanks."

Mal grunted. "Don't mention it." He crossed his arms, uncrossed them again and hooked his thumbs in his gun belt. "I'll show you where to take a shower."

That was about the best idea Dean had heard in a really long goddamn time.

The shower wasn't really what he was expecting, though.

"Two minutes of hot water per day," Mal said proudly, like he thought two minutes was a _really long time_. "Shuts off automatically after that, of course. Here's the refiltration unit. Kaylee rigged it up special; twice as efficient as most units. We don't waste any water."

Great, so Dean would be scrubbing himself with Jayne's dirty crotch-water. Awesome. "That sounds great," he said.

"Soap's there," Mal said. "Shampoo. Towels. There's the laundry, you feel like running anything through.

"Thanks," Dean said. Mal nodded at him and left.

Dean was used to short showers from years of Dad barking at them to hurry up and move their asses. He cut the water on briefly, cut it off again to lather up, cut it on to rinse off. The shampoo smelled like flowers. Dean figured Kaylee probably bought it. It got him clean, though, and Christ, wasn't that a wonderful feeling. He hadn't realized how grimy he was until he wasn't grimy anymore.

He toweled off and tried to figure out how the laundry machine worked. It wasn't hooked up to a water supply, as far as he could tell, which made Dean think it ran dry. Goddamn futuristic technology.

He went back into the adjoining room, where the toilets were, and shaved using one of the electric razors sitting on the shelf over the sinks. His reflection in the mirror looked just the same. He didn't really feel the same, though.

Sam would get him back. He just had to stay on the ship. Then when the vortex opened or whatever, he could hop through it and be right back in South Dakota.

Sam would never believe any of it. He'd think Dean was just fucking with him. _Spaceships, Dean? I didn't believe that when I was six, you really think I'm going to believe it now?_

And then Dean would say, _Whatever, Sammy, I know what I saw. You're just mad because you didn't get it on with any frisky space babes._

And then Sam would roll his eyes and say, _Frisky space babes? Shut the fuck up, man._ And they would both laugh and go have pizza and beer for dinner.

He'd never cut himself with an electric razor before, but suddenly there was blood all over the sink. He cut on the tap and rinsed it down the drain.

The clothes they'd given him fit pretty well. The t-shirt he pulled on was a little too big, but it had a naked lady on it, and Dean had never failed to appreciate a naked lady.

He sat on the bed and thumbed through Dad's journal. He basically had the whole thing memorized, and he knew there was nothing in it that could help him, but he kept coming back to it anyway, like he was convinced that if he looked hard enough, something new would appear, salvation in the form of Dad's cramped hand-writing.

He closed the journal and threw it across the room. It hit the opposite wall and fell to the floor, spread open face-down.

Dean's stomach growled. He thought about eating. He thought about what he would eat with Sam, if Sam was there. Sam would probably want a salad and a hamburger. Dean wanted a grilled cheese sandwich. He didn't know if cheese existed in the future. He hadn't seen any so far.

He went upstairs to the kitchen. His head was throbbing dully, a slow ache toward the back of his skull, right behind his ears.

Jayne was there again, cleaning guns at the table.

"Do you ever go anywhere else?" Dean asked.

"Best light's in here," Jayne said.

"Sure," Dean said. He opened cabinets, drawers, the thing that looked kind of like a refrigerator but wasn't cold. He found bread, and some leftover soup from the night before. He poured the soup into a sauce pan and put it on the stove, which flashed orange and heated up straightaway. Dean yanked his hand back, startled. The soup started bubbling in about fifteen seconds.

"What the hell," Dean muttered.

He sat at the table to eat and watched Jayne methodically taking apart his guns. They looked about the same as the guns Dean was used to, but there were some parts that were slightly different, and some that he didn't recognize at all.

Jayne leaned over and reached into the big canvas bag sitting on the floor beside his chair. "Here," he said, and set a gun on the table—Dean's .45, the one he'd taken from Dad's truck and carried with him for the past six months.

"How'd you get that," Dean said.

"Mal gave it to me. Told me to see if I could figure out how to take it apart." Jayne scratched his shoulder.

"Did you?"

"Yeah. Ain't that different that what we use. Mal likes them old revolvers, but I got a couple pistols look a whole lot like that one you got." Jayne slid a cartridge into the gun he was cleaning, checked it, slid it back out.

"You don't have laser rifles or whatever?" Dean had read a lot of old sci-fi novels when he was a kid, and he always thought it would be cool to live on a moon base and shoot aliens with his laser rifle. Maybe the future just wasn't that exciting.

Jayne snorted. "The Alliance does. That stuff's too fancy for us petty criminal types. Ain't that right, Zoe?"

Dean looked over; Zoe was standing the doorway, eating a pear. "That's right," she said. She walked over and picked up Dean's pistol, turned it around, looking closely at the mother-of-pearl grips. "You know a lot about guns?"

"I learned how to shoot when I was six," Dean said, leaning back in his chair.

"Is that so," Zoe said. She put the gun back on the table.

"Uh, yeah," Dean said.

"Well then." Zoe looked at him for a moment longer, then turned on her heel and walked out toward the cockpit.

"Okay," Dean said.

"Aw, she's just like that," Jayne said. "Pass me that pistol, would ya?"

***

When Zoe got an idea in her head, there wasn't much in the 'verse that would make her let go of it. Mal wished to God she'd never gotten any ideas about Dean.

"We can't just drop him on Paquin," Zoe said. "He doesn't know anything. He doesn't speak a word of Chinese. He'd be scooped up by slavers or worse within a half hour."

"That ain't my problem," Mal said. "Wasn't it _you_ wanted to toss him out the airlock, not four days ago?"

"Me and Jayne," Zoe said calmly, ticking something off on her list.

"So? What, you just changed your mind?" Mal heaved another crate onto the stack. One more and it'd be too high for him to reach, and he'd start a new pile.

" _Yes_ ," Zoe said. "People change their minds sometimes, sir."

"Not you," Mal said. He wiped his forehead on his shirt sleeve. "How many more of these crates we got?"

That wasn't the end of it, though, and they both knew it.

Zoe brought it up again when they were eating lunch, sharing the table with Kaylee and River and whatever board game they were playing.

"What do the two of you think about Dean?" Zoe asked.

"Oh, he's shiny," Kaylee said. "Don't know too much about engines, but then I guess most people don't, right?"

"How about you, River," Zoe said, sharp-eyed, and Mal knew this was going nowhere good.

River shook the dice in her cupped hands and beamed. "I think you should ask the captain what _he_ thinks."

"Girl's lost her mind," Mal said.

"You had a dream last night," River said. "What was it about?"

Zoe rested her chin on her hand and leaned toward Mal. "A dream, sir? Is this something I should be concerned about?"

"I don't have dreams," Mal said, and applied himself to his food. He was _not_ talking about this with a roomful of women.

Zoe found him again, later, while he was going over paperwork in the cargo bay. They were arriving on Paquin the next day, and Mal wanted everything to be in order—no last-minute surprises, no unhappy customers.

"Have you thought about it?" Zoe asked.

Mal looked up. "A bit," he said.

Zoe sat down beside him on the stairs. "I saw him working on the engine with Kaylee."

"What, yesterday? So did I, what of it?"

"That isn't a man who means us any kind of harm, sir," Zoe said, in her firm and undemanding way, and Mal found that he couldn't bring himself to deny the truth of her words.

He sighed and tucked his pen under the catch of his clipboard. "I reckon that's the case."

"The crew's been short for a while now," Zoe said. "We could use an extra hand."

"Why, you got somebody in mind?" Mal asked.

"You need to offer him a place on this crew, and you need to do it fast," Zoe said, "because otherwise he'll get off at Paquin and that's the last any of us will see of him."

"Got no place for him," Mal said. "Boy can't tell his head from his hindquarters. He's useless to me."

"He's a fighter," Zoe said. "You've seen it. He's smart. He knows weapons. He'll learn fast."

"Nonetheless," Mal said. He hated it when Zoe was right. It happened a sight more often than he was comfortable with.

Zoe's mouth twitched, just a little, but Mal recognized it as a smile. "Boy's got you all turned around," she said.

"That ain't so," Mal said, and turned back to his supply lists, ending the conversation. Zoe knew him too well, and sometimes he mightily wished that wasn't the case.

Zoe stood and walked up the stairs. Mal listened to her footsteps receding, the distinctive sound of her boot heels against the steps up to the fore passage.

" _Cao_ ," Mal muttered.

He told the rest of the crew before he told Dean—gathered them for lunch, after Dean had skulked into the kitchen to grab some food and then skulked out again.

"Thought I might offer him a place on the crew," Mal said.

Everyone started talking at once.

"Oh, I think that's just _shiny_ —"

"Are you sure that's such a—"

"What if he doesn't—"

Mal slammed his fist on the table. "Is there any _actual_ dissent here, or are you all just wantin' to hear yourselves talk?"

Simon cleared his throat. Jayne scraped his fork against his plate.

"That's what I thought," Mal said. "I know some of you aren't happy about this, but—well, that's just too gorram bad."

"I think it's a _wonderful_ idea," Kaylee said.

Mal ate his molded protein and tried not think about what a huge pile of _niu shi_ he'd managed to get his crew buried in.

"So that went well, right?" he said to Zoe, later, when they were back in the cargo bay.

Zoe gave him the sort of look that would have struck a lesser man dead on the spot.

"Well, it coulda gone worse," he muttered.

***

When Mal offered him a place on the crew, Dean thought about Sam: he thought about Sam looking for him, going on hunts alone, eating alone in diners, cursing Dean for abandoning him—and he thought about Dad's notebook, and about whatever magic he'd stumbled upon that had thrown him so far away from his life, and about how he might get back—back to Sam.

He had to stay on the ship. Dean knew slim odds when he saw them, but slim was better than none, and if he wanted any hope of finding Sam again, he had to stay and try to figure out what the hell had happened.

"Yeah," he said, looking Mal straight in the eye. "Yeah, okay."

"Okay," Mal said. "Good. Dinner in half an hour."

He lay awake for a long time that night, staring at the curved and dented ceiling, the dirty metal shine of it. If he had any dreams, he didn't remember them.

They landed on Paquin the next morning—afternoon, local time. Mal wouldn't let Dean off the ship until he sat in the infirmary and let Simon give him about two million shots.

"That fuckin' hurts!" Dean complained.

"It's better than dying of one of the local diseases," Simon said. "I've already given you a full course of the standard inoculations, but Paquin has some fairly virulent neurological illnesses that you would probably prefer not to catch."

"Send him out when you're through," Mal said.

The first thing Dean noticed was the air—it was dusty, hot, and smelled vaguely sweet, like oranges. Dean raised his hand to shade his eyes, unused to the bright sunlight. It looked just like Earth, kind of, except the sky was a darker blue, and there were weird low trees growing among the scrub, twisted branches covered with some sort of fruit. The gravity was weaker—not by much, but the first few steps he took felt really fucking weird.

"I gorram hate Paquin," Jayne muttered, coming down the ramp behind him.

"It doesn't look that bad," Dean said. There were little birds sitting in the trees, singing and pecking at each other.

"Yeah, but there ain't any whorehouses," Jayne said.

"Huh," Dean said. He walked out further, away from the ship. Mal was ordering everybody around, getting crates unloaded from the cargo bay. Dean was supposed to be helping, but nobody was paying attention to him.

He looked up at the ship—hulking, metallic, perched on little feet that looked too small to support it. He'd had no idea what it looked like.

River came over to him, her bare feet sending up puffs of dust. "She's beautiful, isn't she."

Dean snorted. "She?"

"You call your car a woman," River said.

"I— _what_?" Dean took an unconscious step back. There was no way she could know that—hell, did cars even _exist_ in the future?

"It's okay, Dean," River said. "You don't need to be scared. Look." She pointed, and he followed the motion of her finger.

There was a yellow circle on the side of the ship, painted in with Chinese characters and the word "Serenity," in big white letters.

"That's her name," River said.

"Serenity, huh." Dean shook his head. He'd never felt _less_ serene in his entire goddamn life.

"Dean! River!" Mal bellowed, gesturing them over with an angry swoop of his arm. "We got cargo to unload!"

They walked toward him, stepping in time. The sun was hot against the back of Dean's neck. He breathed in, feeling his lungs expand. He wasn't thinking about Sam. He picked up a crate.  



	2. Chapter 2

**PART TWO**

"Get _down_!" Mal bellowed. A bullet hit the boulder he was hiding behind, spraying rock fragments into the air. Dean was still running along the dry streambed, crouched down but still exposed, acting like he hadn't heard Mal at all. "Dean! _Daoxiang baozhashi de la duzi_!"

"He has a grenade," Zoe said, reloading.

"He has a—why does he have a grenade?" Mal asked. He poked his head up and fired off a few shots. Someone shouted in pain, and Mal smiled grimly as he ducked the return volley.

"Because I gave him one," Zoe said.

"That was not part of the plan," Mal said. "Grenades were not part of the plan."

"I figured you were too busy pissing off Haruko to realize that it was time to update the plan. Sir," Zoe said. She leaned around the boulder and shot one of Haruko's goons right between the eyes.

"Gorramit," Mal muttered.

Dean came running back up the streambed, arms pumping, a hail of bullets following him, and dove behind the shelter of the boulder just seconds before the grenade went off.

In the silence that followed, Mal stood up and brushed the dust off his pants. "Right," he said. "You still got the money, Zoe?"

"I still have the money," Zoe said, holstering her gun.

"Call River," Mal said. "Haruko's gonna be madder than a nest of hornets, and I reckon we ought to be off this rock before she has time to come lookin' for us."

He didn't say a word to Dean until after they were back on the ship, after the rest of the crew had heard the story, thoroughly mocked Mal for it, and started to wander back to whatever they'd been doing.

"Dean," Mal said sharply, and Dean stopped in the doorway, turned to face Mal, his expression unreadable.

"I gave you a direct order," Mal said.

"Yeah, well, I kept us from getting _killed_ ," Dean said, and Mal grabbed the front of the boy's shirt and slammed him against the wall.

"Listen, _boy_ ," he said, spitting the words out hard, "I realize you ain't been on my crew for too long, but when I say to do something, you do it."

"It was a stupid plan," Dean said, twisting in Mal's grip.

Mal slammed him again, harder, listened with some satisfaction to Dean's low grunt, the air knocked out of him. "You follow orders," Mal said, and he met Dean's angry gaze full on. His eyes were glass-green under the harsh lights of the cargo bay.

Dean licked his lips, looked at Mal, looked away.

"Go get yourself cleaned up," Mal said. He let go of Dean's shirt, and Dean stomped out, shoulders straight and movements tense.

Mal let out a long breath and wiped a hand over his face. Dean had been nothing but a thorn in Mal's paw since the day he came aboard, nothing but insubordination and that smart mouth of his; he made Mal irritable, too tight in his skin.

He went up to the cockpit. "We back on course?" he asked.

"Yes," River said. "Midday tomorrow."

"Good," Mal said. "Remind me to never answer Haruko's waves. Woman's always gettin' herself into trouble. The money ain't worth the time it takes to help her out of it, and somehow she always ends up blamin' us for her own bad sense."

"I told you that," River said.

"Well, next time don't stop the gorram boat," Mal said. River rolled her eyes at him.

Mal went down to his quarters. He wasn't hiding from anyone, he was just resting up. It'd been a long day, what with saving Haruko—again—and having the ungrateful wretch turn on them— _again_. Mal didn't know why he kept trying to help that woman.

It had been a month since Paquin. That job had gone smooth, and the one after it, but currently they were transporting farming equipment out to one of the border moons—all legal-like and above-board—and they kept running into Alliance ships, cruising along like fat vultures waiting for something to die. It made Mal incredibly gorram nervous. He'd heard things—nothing for certain, just the kind of furtive barroom rumors that nobody wanted to repeat too loud—but it was enough to make him leery of going too close to the Core. Rumors about arrests, people disappearing in the night. It wasn't anything he wanted to get tangled up with.

Even less so, now that Dean was on board, with his stubborn refusal to learn the most basic things he needed to know to keep himself out of trouble. River'd been trying to teach him some Chinese, but his _zao gao de_ accent gave him away every time. Everything about the way he talked, the way he moved, set him apart from everyone else, made him stand out. Mal wasn't making much of a fuss about it—not yet—but he wanted to keep Dean away from the Alliance, because with their truly charming scientific curiosity, they'd probably spirit him away to a lab somewhere and he'd end up strapped to a chair and talking about pink polka-dotted monkeys or _shei zhi dao_.

Mal could admit to himself that he wanted to keep Dean away from the Alliance, but he wasn't willing to go any further than that.

At dinner, Kaylee wouldn't quit chattering about the wave she'd gotten from Inara—going on and on about Inara's satin hair ribbons and Inara's fancy clothes and Inara's fancy life. Mal kept his mouth shut, but he didn't linger, either; he finished eating and went on down to the cargo bay. Wasn't anything that really needed his attention, but there was always something that could use doing.

He ended up going over the inventory lists again—he'd already checked the cargo against the lists three times, but a fourth time couldn't hurt.

Someone came down the stairs. Mal looked up.

"Uh, River said you were looking for me," Dean said.

"Did she now," Mal said. That girl could not figure out for the life of her when to let things be.

"So I guess you weren't," Dean said.

"Not especially, no," Mal said.

There was a pause. Mal scratched his nose.

"Yeah, I'm gonna leave now," Dean said.

"Okay," Mal said, and after Dean left, he sat down on one of the crates and closed his eyes.

***

Dean had gotten very good at _not thinking_ about things. He didn't think about Sam, or about how he was five hundred years and something like a million miles away from his life; or how everyone and everything he knew was a bunch of dust orbiting around the sun.

It didn't always work. There were days he couldn't turn his head without seeing Sam out the corner of his eye. Sam's absence was an ache in Dean's chest, like heartburn that wouldn't go away.

Every night after dinner, he went down to his room and looked through Dad's journal, caught on the hope that he'd find something he'd missed before. He never did.

Serenity wasn't home, but Dean didn't mind hanging around while he waited for Sam to get him out. He spent a lot of time with River. She was quiet, and didn't ask a lot of questions, and sometimes she told him things about Mal—"He's taking a shower now," she'd say, and Dean would say, "Uh-huh," like he didn't care at all.

A couple weeks ago, he'd gotten curious, and River had spent the afternoon climbing around the ship with him, looking for protection sigils. Dean figured there was no way that shipbuilders would take their chances on poltergeists deciding to open all the airlocks or foul up the life support system or something; there _had_ to be some sort of defense against that sort of thing, and he'd been determined to find it.

River hadn't asked him what they were looking for, or why, but she'd found the first sigil, carefully stamped into the metal of the pilot's console, low down and underneath where it was hard to see. "Look," she said, her fingers tracing its intricate swirls.

It wasn't anything Dean knew, but he thought he recognized parts of it from old Sanskrit warding symbols—and after that they found many more, scattered in innocuous places all over the ship—Chinese, Norse, Bantu, things Dean didn't recognize. Somebody sure hadn't wanted to take any chances.

When they were on Tien-An a few days later, Dean went in one of the local shops to see if he could buy a new whetstone and some laces for his boots. He noticed a bundle of sage hanging in the doorway; and when he was standing at the counter, trying to figure out which little silver coins to give the man behind the cash register, he saw a small altar with red candles, a dragon figurine, and a dried bundle of lavender.

"What's that for," he asked the counter guy, nodding at the altar with his chin.

The guy scowled at Dean. "Good luck," he said. "Keeps the evil spirits away. You new around here or something?"

"Or something," Dean agreed.

That was the first evidence he'd seen that ordinary people were aware of supernatural goings-on—or at least were following ancient superstitions designed to protect them from the Evil Eye or whatever. Before that, he hadn't really known what to think; he'd been halfway convinced that there weren't any demons anymore, that they'd all been left behind on Earth. He should've known better than that.

There wasn't a damn thing he could do about it, though. He had to stay on the ship, wait for Sam; he couldn't go haring off after every missing kid or suspicious house fire. It wasn't like he'd be able to find out about that stuff, anyway—there weren't any newspapers, or at least he hadn't seen one yet, and River kept trying to teach him how to use that Cortex thing, but it was half in Chinese and way too fancy for Dean. Hell, he'd spent a week clicking on things at random when Sam installed Firefox on the laptop.

So he stayed on the ship and did what he was told. He'd been taking orders his whole life; taking them from Mal wasn't that different, really, just a lot more goddamn obnoxious.

That night, after Haruko, he dreamed that he was sitting in a rowboat with Sam, just the two of them on a wide, shining lake. Dean was rowing, the oars dipping smoothly into the water and out of it again. "Are we fishing?" he asked. "Cause man, you know how I feel about fishing—"

"Shh," Sam said. "Just wait."

Dean kept rowing. His palms burned, but he didn't let go of the oars.

"Okay," Sam said. "You can stop here."

Dean pulled his hands away, and the oars dropped away into the water, sinking fast. Beneath them, something was rising, too dark to see at first, but as it came closer, Dean could see that it was a planet, complete with trees and oceans and cities—an entire world.

He thought about it all through breakfast. He didn't know what it meant.

***

They landed on Three Hills in the morning. When Mal went down to the cargo bay, Jayne was waiting for him.

Mal rolled his eyes. "We been over this already, Jayne."

"Aww, c'mon, Mal, I'm all healed up, I can kill people!" Jayne protested.

"You're still on crutches," Mal said. "What did the doc say?"

Jayne scowled. "Two more ruttin' weeks," he mumbled.

"That's what I thought," Mal said. "Go tell Kaylee to cook you some eggs, you're gettin' in my way."

It was damn unfortunate, though; Mal would much prefer to have Jayne along with him and Zoe rather than Dean. At least Jayne knew when to quit arguing and keep his mouth shut.

"No talkin' unless somebody talks to you first," he told Dean when they were all gearing up. "No funny looks, no shenanigans, and if you disobey orders I will shoot you in the knee on the spot."

"Aye aye, sir," Dean said, and snapped off a crisp salute.

Mal risked a glance at Zoe. She was smirking, and not trying very hard to hide it.

" _Qu ta ma de. Tianxia suoyoude ren. Dou gaisi,_ " Mal said, and shoved his pistol into its holster. "Can we get goin' or do the two of you just want to stand around all day and look pretty?"

"Ready to go, sir," Zoe said. She was still smirking.

The meet-up with Santiago went off without a hitch. He showed up and offloaded the goods, all nice and friendly-like, and gave them a ride over to his store where they sealed the deal. Mal had done business with Santiago before, and he hadn't expected that there would be any problems, but it was nice to be right for once.

Dean came in when Mal and Zoe were in the middle of the polite haggling Santiago enjoyed so much. Mal had told the boy to stay outside and keep watch, and he had half a mind to beat Dean senseless for disobeying orders again.

The look on Dean's face kept him from saying anything, though—a closed-down, compressed expression, eyebrows pulled tight, and Mal knew that meant trouble.

He stepped back to meet Dean. "What is it," he said in an undertone.

"There's something you need to see," Dean said.

"Zoe, can you finish up here?" Mal asked.

"Of course, sir," Zoe said, unruffled, but her eyes flicked back to Dean, and Mal caught the worried crease between her eyebrows.

To Santiago, he said, "Sorry about this; seems there's some trouble on my ship I need to look to. You don't mind dealin' with Zoe, I hope?"

"Not a problem, not a problem," Santiago boomed. "You run along and see to your crew."

"My apologies," Mal said. He clapped one hand on Dean's shoulder and steered him toward the door.

The hallway outside was empty. "Now, you mind tellin' me what the problem is?" Mal asked, ready to be irate in an instant if Dean turned out to be jumping at shadows.

"There's a couple dead guys in the back room," Dean said, quiet.

Mal drew a breath in, let it out. "They have any tattoos on their faces?"

"Yeah," Dean said. "A bunch of little circles on their foreheads."

Mal wanted to hit something—those were slave tattoos, and that meant Santiago was fooling around with business he shouldn't have been fooling around with, and Mal should have known better than to think the job would really go that smooth. "We got a situation," he said.

***

They hightailed it back to the ship. "It was a setup," Mal explained.

"What?" Dean said, totally confused. "In what way?"

"I'll bet you my favorite pair of boots that Santiago got one of his men to put something highly illegal on our boat this morning, when they were unloading." Mal cursed in Chinese, something long and vicious-sounding. "He's probably got the sheriff on his tail for slaving, and he's tryin' to use us as a diversion, cast suspicion our way."

"And they still have Zoe," Dean said.

"Zoe can handle herself," Mal said. "Weren't more than four men in that room."

"But what about—"

" _Bi zui_ ," Mal snapped. "We need to get back to the ship first."

River and Jayne were sitting in the cargo bay, playing cards. "Hey, why're you back so soon?" Jayne asked. "Where's Zoe?"

"Set-up," Mal said. "Santiago, that—" He went off into something else in Chinese that was too complicated for Dean to follow.

"Well hump me like a little bitch," Jayne said.

"River, you know if Zoe's okay?" Mal asked.

"Out of range," River said, shaking her head.

"She'll be here," Mal said. "We need to find whatever Santiago hid on board and get rid of it before the sheriff shows up, or else we'll have the Alliance on us again, and that's the last gorram thing I want to deal with." He rubbed his face with both hands. "Right. Jayne, you check in here. River, the cockpit and the kitchen. Dean, engine room and both shuttles. I'll check med bay and the passenger dorms."

Dean took off running up the stairs. Behind him, receding, he heard Mal say, "Where in the hell are Kaylee and the doc?"

He didn't find anything. A crate in the spare shuttle looked kind of sketchy, but it turned out to be empty. He went back down to the cargo bay.

"Yeah?" Jayne said.

Dean shook his head.

"Gorramit," Jayne said. He hobbled over to the com and switched it on. "Mal? I'm clear, so's Dean."

The com buzzed. "I got something. Dean, you come on down to the infirmary."

Mal was standing in front of one of the counters, rifling through the top drawer. He looked up when Dean paused in the doorway. "Come look at this," he said.

The drawer was crammed with glass vials filled with some sort of clear liquid. "Yeah, so what?" Dean asked.

"It's _bo_ ," Mal said.

"Uh-huh," Dean said.

"It's the kind of illegal that means you don't see daylight again," Mal said. "Alliance tried using it as a painkiller during Unification, but it turns out it's so addictive that the withdrawal was killin' people left and right. Now it's used for assassinations, slave trading—everything bad in the 'verse."

"So we get rid of it before the sheriff shows up," Dean said, shrugging.

"It ain't that easy," Mal said. He held up one of the vials, turned it upside down. There was a tiny blue mark on the bottom, more goddamn Chinese that Dean couldn't read. "You see that? It's been tagged as being sold to this ship. Soon as anyone scans it, they'll know we had it." He cursed violently. "I will have that man by the _balls_ , that double-crossing, _bu yao lian de_ —"

"So what does that mean," Dean said.

"It means we're humped," Mal said. He flipped on the com. "Jayne, Zoe back yet?"

"Just strolled in. Why, we got a problem?"

Mal punched the com off and on again. "River, you need to get us off this rock soon as you can, you hear me?"

"Aye aye, sir," River said.

Mal turned off the com.

"So we're in trouble with the Alliance now? I thought we hated the Alliance," Dean said.

"We do," Mal said. "Which is why we try to play nice and get them to leave us the hell alone." He ran both his hands through his hair. "Let's go."

The crew was gathered in the cargo bay—all except River, and Dean had a feeling she didn't really need to be there to know what was going on. Kaylee and Simon had their clothes all buttoned wrong.

"Santiago put _bo_ on the ship," Mal said without preamble.

Kaylee gasped, her hand flying to her mouth.

"It was tagged," Mal said. "We're humped."

"It's not the first time we've been outlaws," Zoe said. "We've done fine for ourselves before."

Mal snorted. "Right, well, that was before we caused the Alliance ten pounds of trouble when they could only carry nine. You remember that whole delightful adventure?"

"I do," Zoe said, steely cold. Something else was going on here, but Dean didn't have a damn clue what it was.

"Well, no more cozy milk runs. I hope you all have been savin' up your money, because jobs might be thin on the ground for a while."

"Can't we sell the _bo_?" Simon asked. "I'm sure it's worth a king's ransom."

"Only kind of folk willing to fence it are people we don't want to be dealing with," Mal said. "Yakuza, mostly."

Simon blanched. "Never mind."

"Heh. You guys still have yakuza?" Dean asked, but he shut up fast when Mal glared at him.

"What if the Alliance catches us?" Kaylee asked, looking worried. Simon put his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned into him.

"They ain't gonna," Mal said. "Now skedaddle, I need to talk to Zoe."

Dean went up to the cockpit to talk to River. He could handle it as long as he didn't look out the window. River turned her chair around when he came in, looked up at him with those big eyes of hers, too knowing for her little-girl face.

"Her husband died," River said.

"Uh," Dean said. Mal had told him all about River weeks ago, but it still freaked him out when she pulled stuff out of his head like that. "What?"

"Zoe," River said. "The Alliance was telling lies. We told the truth. The Reavers killed Wash. He was the pilot."

"Jesus," Dean said. "So that's why you're flying this thing now."

"Yes," River said.

"I didn't know," Dean said.

"Zoe doesn't talk about it," River said. She tilted her head to one side. "Maybe you should—"

" _No_ ," Dean said, sensing where this was going and not liking it one bit.

River shrugged. "You miss him."

"Which one," Dean grated out, and turned to go.

***

Nothing popped up on the Cortex, but that didn't mean the Alliance wasn't aware of what had happened on Three Hills. Could be they didn't want to alert the local law enforcement—they wanted to deal with the matter themselves. Mal cursed and refreshed the newsfeed. He'd thought they were clear of the Alliance, at least for a little while longer; and maybe that had been a foolish hope, but he'd been clinging to it nonetheless.

"Cap'n!" Kaylee hollered, and Mal winced to hear her boots thumping up the stairs. He had a fearsome headache and couldn't deal with her enthusiasm at the moment, but it sounded like she wasn't about to give him a choice in the matter.

She burst into the cockpit, flushed and beaming. "Cap'n! I got a wave from Inara!"

"Glad to hear it," Mal said, scowling at the Cortex newsfeed.

"She wants us to come visit!" Kaylee said.

Mal shut off the screen and turned to stare at Kaylee. "She what?"

"Well, we're near the training house," Kaylee said. "She wants us to stop by and visit!"

" _No_ ," Mal said. He wanted to put as much distance between them and Three Hills as he possibly gorram could.

"Aww, Cap'n!" Kaylee said, pouting. "It won't take long. We can just swoop on in for a couple hours. Don't even have to leave the ship, she can come here!"

"You ain't gonna take no for an answer," Mal said, his life flashing before his eyes.

"Nope," Kaylee said cheerfully. "I'll call her back and let her know we're comin'!" She went off down the corridor.

"Great," Mal muttered. He went over to the nav console and punched in new autopilot coordinates. River had them heading toward Beylix, but it was easy enough to re-route them toward the training house. It made his teeth ache to do it, but he couldn't say no to Kaylee—he knew she missed Inara, and the rest of the crew would be glad for the visit. He wouldn't let his own bitterness get in the way.

He stomped down to the kitchen. Jayne and Dean were sitting there, cleaning guns, a greasy cloth spread out all over the table.

"You clean up that mess," Mal said. "We're havin' company."

Jayne looked up, his face a study in bafflement. "We are?"

"Inara's comin'," Mal said shortly. "Where's Zoe at?"

"Don't know," Dean said.

Mal went down to the cargo bay. Zoe was there, counting the money she'd finagled out of Santiago.

"We're makin' a detour," Mal said.

"Kaylee already told me," Zoe said. She looked up at Mal. "It's good of you to do this for her."

He shrugged. "Hard to say no to that girl. Figured she ain't the only one might like to see Inara."

Kaylee and River went out to meet Inara at the training house and bring her back to the ship, both of them giggling and giddy. Mal heard their cheerful voices before he saw them cresting the ridge; and then Inara was there, with her silk dress and her big dangly earrings, standing at the bottom of the ramp.

She hadn't changed at all.

"We found her!" Kaylee said, clinging to one of Inara's arms.

"So I see," Mal said. "Welcome aboard."

Inara glided up the ramp, her skirts rustling, and if Mal didn't know better he'd have said she looked nervous. "Hello, Mal," she said.

"Inara," he said, nodding.

There was a silence.

"Everyone else is up in the kitchen," Mal said.

"Thank you," Inara said.

The girls went up the stairs. Mal sat on a crate and pushed a hand into his hair, his elbow resting on his knee.

He still remembered the fight they'd had, the night before she decided she was going to leave—they'd both yelled, thrown accusations, and Inara had cried, the first time he'd ever seen her lose her composure like that—she'd sat on the edge of her bed and wept quietly, while he'd stood there and tried to figure out when everything had gone wrong.

He heard footsteps and looked up. Dean was coming down from the catwalk, arms hanging loose at his sides.

"So that's Inara," Dean said.

"Yup," Mal said. "That's Inara."

"She's hot," Dean said.

Mal grunted. "I should, uh. I should go up there."

Dean went with him, up to the warm kitchen, sun streaming in through the skylight windows, and all the crew laughing and happy, orbiting around Inara.

He'd loved her, once; had thought he always would, but now he wasn't so sure.

He glanced over at Dean. The boy was watching him, quiet and standing away from the rest of the crew, the sun picking out highlights in his hair.

Inara left them in the late afternoon, back to the training house and her obligations. She hugged everyone, even Jayne, but paused in front of Mal and took one of his hands in hers.

"Stay out of trouble, Malcolm Reynolds," she said, her mouth curled into a small smile.

"Same to you," he said, and meant it.

Mal knew he wouldn't sleep easy that night, if at all. He sat in the kitchen long after Zoe had gone to bed, after Jayne had shuffled off to his bunk, after even River had settled in for the night; and then he got up to make tea. Good tea couldn't be flash-heated; the water needed to boil slow, something about oxygenation—Inara had always yelled at him to do it the right way, and he'd learned to enjoy the ritual of it, the way it gave him time to think.

Zoe was mad at him for overreacting—her word—to what she saw as a minor setback after a life of dodging the Alliance. Mal couldn't say for sure why he was so bothered by the idea of being forced to go back to flying under the radar; maybe it was just that he saw his crew doing their best to make good lives for themselves, and after all they'd been through, he wanted it for them. He wanted decent, honest jobs, steady pay, and safe harbor wherever they went.

He'd loved the thrill of it, once—dodging Alliance patrols, coming out with singed eyebrows but all limbs intact. Maybe he was getting old.

There was a noise from the doorway. Mal looked up. Dean was standing there, awkwardly shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

"Couldn't sleep," Dean said. He was wearing a pair of Simon's old cotton trousers, worn and soft, and nothing else.

Mal cleared his throat. "Seems to be a common problem tonight," he said. "I'm making tea."

Dean made a face, but he said, "Okay," and crossed the room to sit at the table.

_Wo de ma_ , Mal thought, and opened the cabinet under the stove. His bottle of good sake was still there—Jayne had controlled himself, for once.

The kettle whistled. Mal poured two mugs of tea and took them over to the table, the sake tucked under his arm.

"What's this?" Dean asked, squinting at the label.

"Sake," Mal said. He set a mug down in front of Dean and took the chair at the head of the table, to Dean's left.

"Ha! I love sake," Dean said, and the way he pronounced it made Mal smile despite himself.

Mal took a sip of his tea. It was the kind of expensive, hand-grown green tea that he would never buy for himself, but he'd developed a taste for it. "Inara bought this," he heard himself saying, and set the mug back on the table, surprised.

Dean raised an eyebrow. "So what was the deal there, were you two knocking boots?"

"Knocking—what?"

"Doing the nasty. Bumping uglies. The beast with two heads," Dean explained.

Mal stared at him blankly.

"Fucking," Dean said.

It was a word he used often enough that Mal had figured out its meaning from context. "No," he said sharply. "It wasn't like that."

"You wanted to, though," Dean said.

Mal shrugged. He didn't want to talk about this; didn't know why he'd brought it up in the first place.

"And then, what, she just took off?"

"Something like that," Mal said. "You know how women are."

Dean snorted. "I'll drink to that," he said, and sipped his tea. He wrinkled his nose and pushed the mug toward Mal. "You drink it. Shit tastes nasty."

"Go get another cup," Mal said, "I'll pour you some sake." He paused. "On second thought, get two."

Mal didn't drink much anymore—it was too expensive, for one thing, and for another, you never knew when there was going to be some sort of crisis that required quick thinking—and he stopped after a few cups and switched back to tea, aware that if he kept going, he would probably do something he'd regret in the morning.

So he sat there and watched Dean: the rippling motion of his throat when he swallowed, the hard muscles of his arms, his brown nipples. Something felt tight and hot in Mal's belly, his throat.

Dean glanced up and Mal was caught there, caught watching. He cleared his throat and looked away.

"Mal," Dean said, his voice deeper than Mal had ever heard it. His hand settled on Mal's forearm, big and warm. "So tell me something."

"Hmm?" Mal said. The room was a little blurry. His heart was beating faster than it should have been.

"What's it mean to say a person's 'sly'?"

Oh _lao tian ye_. "Sometimes, uh. Sometimes a man—sometimes men prefer to, uh, grapple with other menfolk instead of with women."

"Guys fucking guys," Dean said. It wasn't a question.

Mal was very aware of the width of Dean's shoulders and the freckles scattered across them. "I reckon so," he said.

"So have you ever done that sort of thing?" Dean's eyes were hot, compelling. Mal couldn't look away.

"Once or twice," he said. He set his mug down on the table and leaned in, strangely uncertain, pulse running fast. Dean's lips parted, his head tilting, then they were kissing, somehow. Dean's mouth was wet and open against Mal's, his hand curling around the back of Mal's neck, and Mal knew this had been coming but he hadn't been prepared for it, for the thick weight of Dean's tongue in his mouth.

Dean pulled back. "Is this okay?" he asked, voice pitched low and quiet.

"You hear me complaining?" Mal bit the swell of Dean's lower lip, carefully, tugging down and then sweeping his tongue inside. He ran his hands up Dean's arms and down over his back, pulling him closer.

Dean's skin was warm and smooth, and his mouth was warm and slick, and Mal pushed him away, suddenly, stricken.

"We can't do this," he said.

"We can't?" Dean asked.

"No," Mal said. "I'm not—we can't. This can't happen."

Dean shrugged. "Whatever." He stood up, right in Mal's space, and hovered there for a moment, shining in the dim light, before he walked off toward the stairs.

Mal poured the rest of the tea down the sink.

After that, he couldn't lie to himself anymore. It was Dean he was thinking about, more times than not, when he took himself in hand. Something about the boy had gotten deep under his skin and settled in there, restless and hungry.

A few days after that night in the kitchen, Mal went down to the cargo bay for—something; he couldn't remember afterward what it was, exactly—and Dean was there, lifting weights, with Jayne spotting for him.

Dean was shirtless, on his back on the bench, and Mal felt his mouth go dry as he watched the slow deliberation of Dean's movements as he lowered the barbell toward his chest and raised it again, his motions seamless and fluid. Mal paused in the doorway, uncertain, and in that moment Dean looked over and _smirked_ , that mouth of his curving up; and Mal knew, then, that he was lost—that Dean would do whatever it was he wanted to do, and Mal would let him. _Cao_ , would let him and enjoy every moment of it.

***

" _Ni hui jiang yingyu ma_?" River asked.

"Uh. _Hui_ ," Dean said.

"Good," River said. She scribbled something in her notebook. Dean peered at it nervously, but it was all in Chinese, and he only knew about fifty characters, like, "moon" and "sun" and shit that didn't really help him at all.

"Aw, River, why don'tcha teach him somethin' useful?" Jayne asked, wandering into the kitchen.

"This _is_ useful," River said.

"No it ain't," Jayne said. He sat down at the table. "Everybody speaks English. You should teach him how to ask for the whorehouse or somethin'."

"I like that idea," Dean said.

"No whorehouses," Mal called, coming down the stairs from the cockpit. "River, we got—"

"I know," River said.

"Right," Mal said. He stopped in the doorway of the kitchen. "Well."

"We got what?" Jayne asked.

Dean leaned forward, curious. Mal looked twitchy and out-of-sorts, and Dean wanted to know what was going on.

"We got a job," Mal said shortly. "Now quit askin' me so many gorram questions." He stomped off again—probably going to hide in his bunk.

"On Verbena," River said. "Mal doesn't like it."

"Yeah, no kidding," Dean said. "What's the deal with Verbena?"

"Ruttin' Alliance all over," Jayne said. "Somethin' about the war."

"You're always so helpful, Jayne," Dean said.

Jayne made a face. "Least I can _read_ ," he said.

"No you can't," River said.

"That ain't true," Jayne growled. "I don't have to sit here and listen to this." He stood up and clomped off—probably going to hide in his bunk.

"Now then," River said. " _Ni chi le me_?"

The job was probably something pretty exciting, but Dean didn't see any of it—he spent the whole time sitting in the cargo bay with Kaylee and Simon, playing some sort of weird-ass card game that they taught him.

"You ain't leavin' the ship," Mal had said, and that was that—it didn't matter how much Dean argued, Mal wasn't listening to a word of it.

"He's just like that," Kaylee said, shrugging, and dealt out another hand.

"That's not an excuse," Dean grumbled.

"He's scared," River announced. They all turned to look at her; she kept reading her book.

"Yeah, scared of what," Dean asked.

"He thinks you'll get picked up by the Alliance," River said.

Kaylee and Simon exchanged a look.

Everybody on the ship knew too goddamn much about Dean's business. River kept trying to act like his own personal futuristic yenta or something, and if she kept babbling shit left and right, the whole crew would know what was going on before too long.

"Now River—" Simon began.

"Whatever," Dean said. "Gimme another card."

He lurked around the passenger lounge that evening, pretending to read Dad's journal, and when Mal finally came down the stairs and headed into the bathroom, Dean followed him in.

Mal was bent over one of the sinks, splashing water on his face; his shirt was untucked, his feet bare. He didn't look up when Dean came in and shut the door. Dean pressed his advantage and crowded Mal up against the vanity, his hands on Mal's hips.

Mal turned off the tap and straightened, wiping his face on his shirt sleeve. He met Dean's eyes in the mirror, and Dean felt himself go hot all over.

"I told you no," Mal said.

"Tell me yes," Dean said, breathing the words against the nape of Mal's neck.

" _Ta ma de_ ," Mal swore, and Dean sure as hell knew what _that_ meant.

"Yeah, okay," he said, and reached around to unfasten Mal's pants.

Mal let him. Dean watched a slow flush rise out of the loose collar of Mal's shirt, but Mal didn't look away, and he settled his hands on the edge of the vanity, holding on. Dean's breath was coming too fast. The door wasn't locked, and Zoe or whoever could walk in any second and wouldn't that just be real fucking delightful, but Dean didn't care anymore—he'd been waiting for this for weeks, and now he had it, and he didn't fucking care about anything else.

Mal wasn't wearing anything beneath his pants, which made sense, as tight as they were, but _Jesus Christ_. Dean wrapped his hand around Mal's cock, a light grasp, teasing, and Mal hissed through his teeth and bucked his hips forward.

Dean smirked. "You've been waiting for that for a while, huh," he said.

"You talk too gorram much," Mal said. He braced himself on his hands, slumped forward a little, away from Dean; but Dean could still see his face in the mirror, not all of it, but enough to tell that Mal had closed his eyes.

Dean bit his lip and rubbed at the head with his thumb, testing the slickness there. He'd done this a thousand times—to himself and to other guys, every so often—but this was new: the weight of Mal's cock in his hand, the loose play of foreskin.

He circled his thumb and index finger and tugged a little, feeling things out. Mal made a noise deep in his chest. Dean had never been so hard, fuck, _never_. He slid his free hand underneath Mal's shirt, scraped his fingernails across Mal's nipples.

He wasn't gentle. He worked Mal fast and rough, merciless, watching the way Mal's mouth contorted, the way his hands flexed on the countertop. He thought about fucking Mal; thought about Mal fucking _him_ , thought about—

He bit down hard on the knob at the base of Mal's neck, and Mal came into Dean's hand, jerking raggedly, gasping out unsteady breaths, his mouth and eyelids slack.

Dean let go, and Mal turned around, leaning back against the vanity. He tucked himself back in his pants, and he was so flushed, so dazed-looking, that it should have been fucking hilarious, but instead Dean just wanted to hold him down and make him beg for it.

"Christ," Dean said. He scrabbled his pants open and wrapped his wet hand around his cock. It didn't take long. He came with Mal's eyes on him, dark and unreadable.

He leaned around Mal to wash his hand off under the tap, and Mal wrapped an arm around his waist, tugged him closer.

Mal kissed like he was dying for it—like it had been years since he'd touched another human being, and Dean was pretty sure that wasn't the case, but he wasn't complaining—he grabbed a fistful of Mal's shirt and held on.

They broke apart, finally, panting. Dean bit down on Mal's lower lip, carefully, setting the imprint of his teeth there. He wanted everything—Christ, he wanted _everything_.

He pulled back. "I'm gonna, uh."

"Right, of course," Mal said. "I need to—"

"Right, yeah," Dean said, and took himself off to bed.

***

By dinner, Mal was prepared to give in to the inevitable. He felt the pull of Dean's presence like a magnet, spinning him around to point a different way. He ate his protein and watched Dean, and Dean watched him right back. Anticipation was a nervous flare at the bottom of Mal's spine. What they were doing was careless and stupid and Mal didn't care at all.

In the engine room, late at night, the spinning engine sang with life while Mal's crew slept in their bunks. He pinned Dean against one of the solid engine supports and went to his knees, listening to the humming soul of his ship and the patternless cadence of Dean's gasps.

That was how it started. Leaving Beylix, Dean slipped into Mal's bunk and they rutted on the bed like they would die if they didn't, Dean pressed warm and hard against the full length of Mal's body. On Seinan, waiting overnight for a shipment, Mal sat in his armchair and watched Dean touch himself, both hands working between his splayed legs.

They didn't talk about it.

On Rosekeep, Dean and Jayne strolled off together after dinner and didn't come back until morning. Mal knew where they'd gone.

"You smell like a whorehouse," he told Dean.

"Yeah, because I was in one," Dean said. "I fucked a whore, too. Her sweet pink cunt—Christ, you should've seen it, Mal. Money can't buy pussy like that."

"Apparently it can," Mal said. He locked his bunk that night, but the night after that he was tapping on Dean's door, filled with too much wanting to stay away for long.

On Karpov Moon, a few weeks before U-Day, he and Dean were in a crappy bar, trading shots of gin, when the screen feed flipped over to commercials and Dean bolted out of there like someone had set his pants on fire. Mal, the Maidenhead all too fresh in his mind, went after.

Dean was striding down one of the dusty roads leading away from town, his hands shoved deep in his pockets, the collar of his jacket flipped up around his ears. Mal caught up with him just as he ducked into a cluster of trees, and clapped a hand on Dean's shoulder.

Dean whirled around, dislodging Mal's hand. "Don't fuckin' touch me," he snarled.

Mal held up both his hands, placating. A warm breeze started up, smelling of hay and flowers. "What happened back there," Mal said.

"I dunno," Dean said, hunching up his shoulders.

"You saw something?" Mal asked.

Dean turned away from him, placed a hand on the trunk of a sapling, started picking at the bark with his thumbnail. "Heard something," he said. "It was—I heard a song I—that I used to know."

There were old songs from Earth-That-Was that were still used in advertisements, movies—especially stuff geared at the fancy types from the Core, who still cared about things that old. Mal hadn't been thinking of that. "It's not—"

"You know what I miss," Dean cut in. "I miss French fries from McDonald's, and diner food, and driving, and fuckin' fifty-dollar-a-night motels, and my—" He broke off.

"Your brother," Mal said.

Dean peeled a long piece of bark away from the tree and crumbled it in his fist. "He was. We were close."

Mal knew about family, and about leaving them behind. "I'm sorry," he said.

"Yeah, well, he's fuckin' gone now," Dean said, "just like every other fuckin' thing—"

"Come back to the ship," Mal said, and Dean nodded wearily, still looking away.

Dean followed Mal to his bunk, which Mal wasn't expecting; stripped off all his clothes and got on the bed on his hands and knees, a clear and unspoken invitation.

"I want you to fuck me," Dean said.

Mal's breath hitched, caught. It wasn't the time—not with Dean as upset as he was, all turned about and twisted up inside, but Mal wasn't a good man, never had been, and he wanted it. He touched the back of Dean's neck, drew one hand all the way down Dean's spine, and touched him there, thumb rubbing lightly, and then pressing just the smallest way in.

Dean's head dropped down toward the mattress. "Yeah," he said. "Do it."

Mal pulled off his shirt and his boots, but that was as far as he got—Dean was working intently at his own flesh, and Mal couldn't wait any longer—didn't want to. He drew himself out of his pants, and with his other hand grabbed for the tube sitting on the table at the foot of the bed. Their was a feeling inside his chest, loose and fluttering. He couldn't identify it—didn't want to.

"Come _on_ ," Dean muttered impatiently, and Mal pressed two slick fingers into him, deep in and curving. He rubbed slowly, listening to the noises Dean made, the low hungry grunts. Dean was so hot inside, so smooth and vaguely flexing. They hadn't done this before.

"You're ready for it," Mal murmured, speaking more to himself than to Dean. He slicked himself, and the pull of his own fist was almost enough. He pressed into Dean, slowly, trying to take care, trying to be a gorram _gentleman_ for once in his godforsaken life.

When he was all the way inside, Dean huffed out his breath and dropped to his elbows, his face pressed into the pillow.

It was overwhelming—Dean's strong back all laid out before Mal, the tight clench of his body, the unhurried roll of his hips. Mal ran a hand over Dean's side, soothing, and moved out of him, and back in.

"Harder," Dean said, "Jesus, _harder_."

Mal obliged him.

Dean was gone in the morning, but Mal found his necklace twisted up with the sheets, the leather cord broken. He'd never seen it up close before; Dean never took it off, and Mal wondered whether Dean had intentionally left it behind or whether it had snapped off at some point.

The amulet was small and golden, something with horns, eyes, a mouth—a bull or a man; Mal wasn't entirely sure which.

He put it in his pocket and kept it there until he found Dean, looking at knives at the market and failing badly at his attempt at haggling with the vendor.

"You forgot something," Mal said.

Dean looked at him, brows furrowed. The sunlight made him look pale, his freckles more pronounced. "I did?"

Spring had come early to Karpov, and everyone was out bickering and haggling and stirring up all kinds of fuss. Mal tilted his head toward the mouth of an alley, and they moved toward it, away from the crowds.

Mal drew the necklace from his pocket. "From what I know, you're meant to wear these around the neck," he said.

Dean took it. "I guess the strap broke," he said. "I didn't—I didn't know."

"I figured as much," Mal said. "If you don't mind me askin'—"

"It's for protection," Dean said. He snorted. "It's worthless now. Not many demons in outer space."

"But you've kept it," Mal said. He still didn't know if he believed in all this demon nonsense, but Dean certainly did, and that would have to be enough to satisfy Mal's curiosity.

"Yeah," Dean said, looking down at the amulet. After a moment, he shrugged and slipped it into his pants pocket.

Mal cleared his throat. "We're leavin' at sundown," he said. "Don't be late."

"I won't," Dean said.

On Lusei, Kaylee disappeared.  



	3. Chapter 3

Dean had been off-kilter since Karpov Moon. He'd never been a big Beatles fan, but Dad had loved them, and hearing "The Long and Winding Road" in that piece-of-shit bar had put Dean right in the back seat of the Impala, dozing off to that goddamn string section, Sammy already asleep and drooling onto his teddy bear.

It was too much. Everything he'd been refusing to think about for the past three months had come rushing over him, like a fucking tidal wave, and knocked him right on his ass. He hadn't managed to stand back up quite yet.

He'd never been homesick in his life—never really had anyplace to be homesick _for_ —but he imagined this was what it felt like. He was homesick for Sam, and for the Impala, and for convenience store junk food.

He did his work, talked to River, fucked Mal; but all of his attention was focused on what would happen when he got back to Sam. He figured Sam would probably think he was a thought-form or a shape-shifter or something, and Dean would spend a day or two proving that he wasn't; and then Sam would probably try to drag him to a hospital, but Dean would put his foot down about that. Maybe they'd spend a while holed up in a motel room somewhere.

He had elaborate fantasies about watching TV and taking long showers and eating bacon from an actual pig. Maybe it was weird, but he couldn't stop. Some days it was all he thought about.

On Lusei, Mal took him to the market and bought some kind of fruit—Dean had never seen it before, didn't know what it was. It had a dark red skin; the flesh inside was a lighter red, with small yellow seeds.

They sat together on the low stoop of an abandoned building, and Dean watched as Mal used his pocket knife to cut slices out of the fruit. Lusei was hot and dusty, already well into its dry summer months. Dean rubbed grit out of his eye, feeling bleary and irritable.

"Open your mouth," Mal said.

Dean looked over, one knuckle still in his eye. "What?"

Mal was holding a slice of fruit, its juices running down his hand. "Open your mouth," he said again.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" Dean asked. He took the slice out of Mal's hand and popped it in his mouth. It was sweet and cool, densely flavorful; and all Dean could think about was mangoes, the last time he'd had one, whether he'd ever eat one again.

Mal reached out and ran his thumb over Dean's lower lip. Dean felt himself flushing and hated it. The way Mal looked at him—Dean knew what it meant, but he couldn't bring himself to turn away from it. Maybe he was just plain stupid.

" _Ta ma de_ ," Mal said. "I can't seem to keep my hands off you."

Dean snorted. "And that's a problem?"

"No," Mal said slowly. "I reckon not."

They were still sitting there when Simon came running up, sweaty and panicked. "Please tell me one of you has seen Kaylee," he said.

Dean glanced over at Mal. "Uh, no," he said.

Simon ran a hand through his hair. " _Damn_ it. She told me she'd meet me at the Turtle Hen at two, and it's half past now, and I don't know—"

"It ain't like her to be that late," Mal said. "Ten minutes, sure, but a half hour—"

"No. I know," Simon said. "That's why I'm—you don't suppose anything happened to her?"

"I'm not sure," Mal said, "but we better get back to the ship."

"Shouldn't we look for her first?"

"Not if the Alliance is involved," Mal said. "Last thing we need is to have them take all of us."

Dean sat in the cargo bay with Jayne and Zoe, playing cards and waiting. After a while, Mal came down the stairs from the cockpit.

"There ain't anything on the Cortex," Mal said. "If the Alliance picked her up, we would know."

"You sure about that?" Zoe asked. "They think we were smuggling _bo_. If they have Kaylee, they don't want us to find out about it before they're ready for us to."

"Can't be the Alliance," Mal said, shaking his head. "They're all about followin' protocol, and protocol says they got to send a message off-world. They haven't sent a thing since last night."

"Maybe they're waiting," Zoe said.

Mal crossed his arms and glared. "Why are you arguin' with me about this? You know as well as I do how the Alliance goes about their business."

"I'm just trying to consider all the options, sir," Zoe said, and dealt Dean the best hand of poker he'd ever had. He glanced at the cards and placed them face-down on the crate. Poker wasn't exactly the most important thing on his mind at the moment.

"Can't River tell where she is?" he asked.

Mal shook his head. "Wherever Kaylee is, it's too far away for River to read her."

"So what are we gonna ruttin' do," Jayne said.

Mal shrugged. "She knows what time we're leavin'. She ain't back by then, that's how we know something happened."

Kaylee didn't come back. Mal gathered them all in the kitchen. Simon wouldn't sit down, and kept pacing the floor, wild-eyed. It was making Dean twitchy.

"We should contact the sheriff," Simon said. "Maybe he can—"

"Can't," Mal said. "He'd turn us right over to the Alliance."

Simon slammed his fist on the kitchen counter. River got up and touched her brother's elbow, guided him to the table. He sat down wearily, his clothes all wrinkled and messed up, and took a drink from the bottle Jayne offered him.

"We're gonna find her," Mal said. "I can promise you that, Simon."

"I know," Simon said. He ran a hand through his hair. "I know that. _Gai si_!" He got back to his feet and started pacing again.

"Would you please sit the fuck down," Dean said.

Simon turned to glare at him, mouth opening to say something, and Dean hoped he would—he wanted an excuse to punch somebody, and Simon was as good as anyone—better than most, really.

" _Dean_ ," Mal said sharply, and Simon closed his mouth.

Dean crossed his arms and glared at the table. He hated getting ordered around.

"We've got two hours until sundown," Zoe said.

"That's the plan," Mal said. "We'll head out soon as Simon tells me whatever it is he ain't been telling me."

"There's nothing," Simon said.

"I wish you wouldn't lie to me," Mal said mildly.

Simon looked at River, who gave him a look that Dean couldn't read at all.

"Kaylee's pregnant," Simon said.

"Well ruttin' hell!" Jayne exclaimed, tipping his chair back on two legs.

"And you didn't see fit to tell me this?" Mal asked, voice tight with anger.

"She's only a couple months along," Simon said. "We wanted—we were going to wait to tell everyone. Until we were sure."

"That's their right," Zoe said. "You don't need to know about everything that happens on this ship, sir."

"I do when it's somethin' like this!" Mal said.

"No," Zoe said. "You don't."

Dean cleared his throat. "So can we get going?"

Mal tore his gaze away from Zoe. "River, you stay here. Anybody tries to come on board, you don't hesitate to shoot them. Simon, Jayne, you're with me. Zoe, you and Dean go check in town. We'll look up in the hills. Everybody meet back here at 1830. Well, quit lookin' at me, get moving!"

"You stick close to me," Zoe said, tossing Dean another gun. "We'll check the market first. Kaylee was probably looking for engine parts."

"She told me she wanted a new Kefesseler link-up," Dean said.

"Probably went to Rossy's, then," Zoe said. "Let's get going."

"We're gonna find her," Dean said. "Right?"

"We will," Zoe said.

***

Mal took them up in the hills overlooking the town, where there was farmland and little farm huts. He'd been suspicious of hill folk ever since that business with Simon and River getting taken, and it seemed like the most sensible place to start looking.

Nobody wanted to tell them anything. "You seen a girl, 'bout this high, brown hair?" Mal asked a woman wearing a patched skirt.

"Ain't seen nobody all day," the woman mumbled, giving Mal a dark look, and went on her way.

"This is hopeless," Simon said.

Mal didn't answer, but he was inclined to agree. "Gettin' dark," he said. "We ought to head back." He turned on his radio. "Zoe? You there?"

The radio crackled. "Nothing yet, sir."

"Same here," Mal said. "Meet us back at the ship."

"We're heading back there now," Zoe said. "We've got something you ought to see."

Dean clunked it down on the middle of the kitchen table: some bulky metal thing, most likely an engine part—Mal wasn't exactly sure.

"So what is it," Mal said.

"Rossy said Kaylee was looking at it, and then all of a sudden she dropped to the ground and started screaming," Zoe said.

"Huh," Mal said. He reached out to touch it, but Dean grabbed his wrist.

"Don't," he said. He let go of Mal and put the thing back in the plastic bag he'd carried it in, and stripped off his gloves.

"What's it gonna do, bite him?" Jayne asked.

Dean sighed. "You aren't going to believe me."

"What is it," Simon said.

"I, uh," Dean said. "I think she might be possessed."

"That ain't good," Jayne said.

"Possessed," Mal said. He looked at Zoe; her face was impassive.

"That's right," Dean said. "If I still had my fucking EMF reader, I could—"

"Your what?" Mal asked.

"You have it," River said, the first words she'd spoken since this whole pile of nonsense started. Mal didn't know what went on in that girl's head half the time, but he reckoned she noticed a sight more than most people did, what with all the quiet observation.

"I do?" he asked.

"You found it on him. The first day," River said. "It's in your bunk."

Mal looked at Dean. "Black thing with little lights on the front?"

"That's it," Dean said. "If you'll give it to me, I can show you."

So Mal went and fetched the gorram thing, because the only people there to judge him were folk who'd seen him do an awful lot worse.

"It measures supernatural activity," Dean said, fiddling with a knob. "If the batteries are still good, it should—there." He switched it on and held it over the engine part, and every light on the thing flashed red. "Off the goddamn charts."

"That's very nice," Simon said, "but I don't see how that's going to get Kaylee back."

"This thing _did_ something to her," Dean said. "It's got some sort of demon in it, and when Kaylee touched it, the goddamn thing possessed her."

"Possessed," Mal repeated.

" _Yes_ ," Dean said. "I know you don't believe me, but you need to, because I know how to fix her."

"I never heard about this sort of thing until you came on board," Simon said. "Which makes me wonder if you're involved with this—"

"Why would I do that to Kaylee," Dean ground out.

"How should I know," Simon said, "you're the one talking about _demons_ —"

Mal grabbed Dean's shirt before he could throw a punch. " _Stop it_ ," he snarled, shaking Dean hard. "This ain't gonna help Kaylee. And _you_ ," he said, looking at Simon, "quit provoking him. You can't behave yourself, go down to med bay until this is all over."

Dean jerked himself free and pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. " _Fuck_."

"Maybe you should let him try, sir," Zoe said. "It can't hurt."

"Sure can't," Jayne said. "I seen this all the time, growin' up—guess he just needs a little prayer and some—"

"What if it _does_ ," Simon said, still all agitated, and Mal didn't like where this was going—all of them frantic, everyone on the crew, and all of them taking it out on each other, and Dean stirring things up even more with this _possession_ nonsense.

"We'll go look for her again tomorrow," Mal said. "First thing. I don't want to go runnin' around in those hills at night—we're liable to get shot at by some trigger-happy farmboy."

" _Tomorrow_?" Simon said. "We can't wait that long, what if—"

"Nothin' we can do about it right now," Mal said. "We'll all be better for the night's sleep. Tomorrow we'll find her and bring her back to the ship."

"And then do what with her," Dean said. "She's got a fucking _demon_. You bring her on this ship, you'll have more trouble than you know how to deal with."

"Don't tell me what I can handle, boy," Mal snapped.

"Stop it!" River yelled, and when Mal looked over at her, her face was wet with tears. "You're worried, but this won't help," she said to Simon, and then turned to Dean. "You have demons in your head," she told him.

"Demons in my—Jesus _Christ_ ," Dean said.

"Everybody go to bed," Mal said, and pointed at Dean. "Except for you."

He waited until the rest of the crew had filed out of the kitchen, headed off to bed and hopefully sleep—although he doubted anybody would get much sleep tonight. Dean squared his shoulders and met Mal's gaze full-on, not wavering one bit.

Mal stepped toward him. "I don't want to hear any more of this demon nonsense," he said quietly. "You come out again tomorrow and help us find Kaylee. No antics, no muckin' things up."

"You aren't gonna be able to help her," Dean said. "I can."

"Don't argue with me," Mal said. "Go to bed. I'll see you in the morning."

He didn't, though; Dean wasn't at breakfast, and when Mal sent Zoe to check the boy's quarters, she came back alone.

***

Fucking self-righteous asshole thought he knew every goddamn thing in the world—the man would probably stand there and watch Kaylee frothing and shrieking right before his eyes and deny that there was a single fucking thing wrong with her.

Dean hoisted his canvas bag higher on his shoulder, feeling his anger roil in his stomach like a bad meal. He'd thought Mal trusted him—he'd thought he'd made a place for himself on the crew, but at the first sign of trouble, Mal turned away from him. Dean wasn't _surprised_ , exactly—it was a hard thing to believe—but he'd hoped that Mal—that Mal would—

It didn't fucking matter what he'd hoped. He had to find Kaylee and exorcise that fucking demon, and get them both back to the ship without getting shot by some crazy-ass hill farmer.

He went to the market and scrounged up all the things he needed for the ritual: salt, dried sage, even a wooden crucifix on a leather cord. None of the sellers even blinked. That was one good thing about these shitty rim planets—nobody cared if you fucking killed a man in public and ate his dog, as long as you were quiet about it.

He went up to the hills, then. The road out of town was tamped-down, well-traveled; he stayed off it, made his own way through the tall grasses, waist-high. The sun hadn't fully risen yet.

He wasn't really sure where to start. If Mal hadn't found Kaylee yesterday, Dean wasn't sure how the hell he was gonna do it. It wasn't like he was any good at sweet-talking people; that's what he'd kept Sam around for, to—

Whatever. Sam wasn't there, he'd just have to do it himself.

He found a little farm village—five huts and a pigsty—and camped out by the well. A girl came down, carrying a big jar. She was young, pretty enough underneath the dirt. Dean lounged on the trampled grass and gave her his best smile. She flushed, lowered her eyelids, smiled down at her jar.

"Good morning to you," Dean say, imitating Mal's speech patterns, his accent.

"Good morning," the girl murmured, bashful and pink.

Dean clambered to his feet. "I was wonderin' if you could help me with a little problem I got," he said.

"I...have to—my mother—"

"It won't take long," Dean said, leaning toward her.

She clutched her jar against her chest. "I—I suppose so—"

"See, I have a sister," Dean said. "She went to the market yesterday, and now I plain can't find her. She gets these fits, sometimes, falls down and flails all about, all talkin' and screamin', and I'm worried that some kind soul might've taken her in, not knowing. You wouldn't happen to know of anything like that, would you?"

"N-no," the girl said. "I'm sorry, I don't."

The fourth girl he tried it on knew exactly what he was talking about, and she led him straight to her aunt's hut.

It was dark inside, smoky, but Dean could still see Kaylee on a low bed against the wall, twisting and yelling like she'd lost her mind.

"Praise God," he said, "that's her."

"Who's this, Marilee," a voice said, and a large man materialized out of the gloom—enormous, hairy, carrying a gun. Just Dean's goddamn luck.

"It's her brother," the girl—Marilee—said. "He's been lookin' for her. Says she gets like this sometimes, all fits and hollerin'."

The large man looked at Dean like he was a bug to be crushed. "How do we know he ain't just sayin' that," he said. "Might be you mean her some sort of harm."

"She knows me," he said, hoping wildly that that was true. "Sometimes, if I sit with her and talk with her for a while, it helps calm her down."

The man looked at Marilee and then back at Dean. "Well, all right," he said slowly. "I reckon that can't hurt. But you make one wrong move and I will shoot your brains out."

"My thanks to you," Dean said. He felt like an asshole talking like that, but Mal and River had both been getting after him about the way he talked, and he figured these fucking hill people or whatever weren't too nice to strangers.

He sat on the edge of Kaylee's bed and held her hand. Her eyes snapped open—they were red, burning. She smiled at him, slowly. "Hi there, Dean," she said, and her voice wasn't her own.

He forced himself not to jerk his hand away and looked over at Marilee and the dude with the gun. "She knows me," he said, blinking as if his eyes were misting up. They were, a little. He was really fucking glad he'd found her.

He couldn't take her back to the ship like this, though. Then they'd _really_ think it was his fault. Except for Jayne, apparently, but nobody listened to him.

"I'd like to take her home, if I could," he said. "I got some special medicine that helps her."

The guy scratched his head. "Well, I suppose she did recognize you, so—"

Dean stood up and shook the guy's hand before he could change his mind. "I'm in your debt," he said. "The kindness of strangers, praise the Lord. It looks like you took real good care of her."

"We tried our best," Marilee said.

"I was wondering," Dean said, "if you  might have a spare Bible I could borrow? I'd like to read some words over her, and my Good Book is lent out to a neighbor."

They gave him a Bible and a blanket, helped him bundle Kaylee up in it. She snarled and spat and bit his shoulder when he picked her up. Dean cupped the back of her head with one hand and held her close. He didn't love her the way Simon did, or the way Mal did, but maybe he loved her enough to do this. Knowing she was carrying a baby made him even more furious, more determined to cast out whatever evil son of a bitch had decided to take up residence inside of her.

The sun was fully up by the time he stepped back outside, Kaylee in his arms. Lusei was a hot planet, and early May was warm and dry. He was wearing one of Mal's bizarre-ass Old West shirts over a t-shirt, and he was sweating after about five minutes.

He headed for a stand of tree he'd seen that morning, higher up in the hills, away from the villages. It took him about half an hour, mostly due to Kaylee barking like a dog and fighting him every step of the way. It was like being in that fucking _Exorcist_ movie—demons didn't usually act like this when they were inside somebody; they were too busy making deals or fucking or stirring shit up.

"No pea soup," he muttered, and Kaylee cackled with laughter.

The trees were tall, billowing in the wind, already fully-leafed. He lay Kaylee down in the shade, on the grass and the low rambling plants twined among it, and stripped off his overshirt. He was really fucking hot.

Kaylee drooled and thrashed her head. "I know what's inside your heart, Dean Winchester," she said.

He looked out at the hills and the blue sky, the sun shining, the fucking birds singing in the fucking trees—and Kaylee, possessed by a demon, and he had no goddamn clue what an exorcism would do to her baby—what the demon might have done to it already.

He was scared. He wished Sam was there.

The Bible was half in Chinese and half in English. Dean rolled his eyes and flipped through it until he found the right passage. He had the words memorized, but it never hurt to have a backup, in case he fucked up halfway through and needed to find his place.

"All right," he said to Kaylee. He clutched the crucifix in his hand, took a deep breath, and started the exorcism.

It didn't work. Kaylee screamed and flopped around, but the demon kept grinning at him out of her eyes, and when he finished the ritual, it was still there, smirking, and Kaylee was clawing at the dirt and wailing.

"What the _fuck_ ," Dean said, and did the whole thing again.

It didn't work.

He stumbled away from the clearing and fell in the grass right beyond the trees. The sun beat down on him, high overhead. He was reeling. He didn't know what went wrong, why it didn't work, why the demon hadn't fled—he'd been so sure that he knew what to do to help her; he'd told Mal, he'd told _everyone_ that he could do it, that he could bring her back to them—

It hadn't been a lie. He'd known. He'd _known_. But he'd been wrong, and he didn't have a single fucking clue what to do next.

If Sam was there, he'd pull out his laptop and look on Wikipedia or wherever, and he'd come up with some crazy-ass ritual that combined elements of Jewish and Hindu religious practices and required the blood of three newborn lambs, or something—but it would work. That was the important part. Sam made things work, unlikely as they sounded.

Sam wasn't coming to get him. Lying there on the ground, sweaty and exhausted, Dean could admit it to himself, finally. He was alone.

He closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of the grass, the dark earth beneath him, his own sweat drying on his skin. He thought about that last morning with Sam: they'd eaten at a roadside diner, and Sam had stolen half of his biscuit, and Dean had kicked him under the table until Sam gave in and started kicking him back, laughing.

He thought about that last evening with Sam, when they'd eaten pizza and mocked awful reality shows, making up their own dialog.

He thought about Mal, rubbing his thumb over Dean's mouth.

Kaylee was still lying there, yelping. Dean dug around in his bag until he found his radio. He clicked it on.

"This is Dean," he said.

A pause; then the radio crackled. "Where in the hell are you." It was Mal.

"I found her," Dean said. He swallowed. "I need help. Send Jayne."

"I'll be there—"

"No," Dean said. "I need Jayne."

He heard Mal muttering cuss words under his breath, and then the noise of the com being put down, and Mal hollering for Jayne; then silence for a while. "Where are you," Mal said.

"Up in the hills," Dean said. "Tell Jayne to follow the main road to the fifth village, then veer off to the northwest. I'm in a stand of trees. I'll keep an eye out for him."

"You'd best know what you're doing," Mal said.

"I do," Dean said. He hesitated. "Thanks," he said.

"Just bring her back," Mal said, and clicked off.

Jayne showed up a little past noon. Dean was eating a roll filled with cheese and potatoes when he saw Jayne cresting the hill; he stood up and waved. Jayne waved back.

"What in the ruttin' hell do you want me for," Jayne said, when he got closer.

"You believed me what I said she was possessed," Dean said.

"Yeah, well." Jayne shrugged. "These backwater planets ain't like the Core. Things out here that nobody on them fancy planets ever dreamed about."

"Come look at her," Dean said.

" _Wo kao_ ," Jayne said, standing over Kaylee. She opened her red eyes and sneered up at him.

"Pretty much," Dean said. "I did an exorcism, but it didn't work."

"Huh," Jayne said. He picked up the Bible that Dean had left lying on the grass and flipped through it. "Maybe it ain't a Christian demon."

"What," Dean said.

"Well hell, half the people on this world ain't Christian. Lots of Buddhists. Maybe some sort of Buddhist demon got into her."

Dean blinked. "Oh," he said.

"Here we go," Jayne said, and passed the Bible over. "This looks like the right one. Sometimes they put them Buddhist rituals in these Bibles, you know, just to make sure. Can't hurt to have more than one power lookin' after you."

"I guess not," Dean said. The ritual was in Chinese—written out in English letters, thank fuck, but he wasn't sure he knew how to pronounce all the words correctly. "I don't know if I can do this," he said.

"You better, 'cause I ain't gonna," Jayne said. "I don't do this exorcism _gou si_."

"Okay," Dean said. He knelt on the grass beside Kaylee and held the Bible open on his knees. "Okay." He closed his eyes. Opened them again.

***

After Dean called, Mal spent the rest of the afternoon pacing the length of the cargo bay, back and forth, waiting. Simon paced with him for a while, but it started to wear ferociously on Mal's nerves, and he sent the doc up to the cockpit to see if River could calm him down a bit.

It was a hot day. Mal watched through the open doors as the sun rose, started to lower again. A warm, dusty breeze blew in. He sat on a crate and waited.

It was close to nightfall when they came back. He saw them walking through the lowering dusk, heading toward the ship, and stood up, stood there in the middle of the floor, waiting for them.

Jayne came on board first, carrying Kaylee, a blanket-wrapped bundle in his arms. He grunted at Mal.

"Is she—" Mal said.

"She's fine," Jayne said. "Where's the doc?"

"Simon," Kaylee mumbled sleepily, her eyes still closed.

"Cockpit," Mal said, and Jayne went.

Dean followed more slowly, his boots thudding heavily against the ramp. He paused at the threshold and looked at Mal.

Mal looked back. He didn't know what was in his eyes. He hoped it was the right thing.

Dean moved forward, kept walking until he was shoving Mal against the bulkhead and kissing him, reckless and sloppy, his tongue tracing the half-healed split in Mal's lip from the bar fight he'd gotten into on Rendun.

Somebody wolf-whistled. It might have been Zoe; woman always showed up at the most inopportune moments. Mal closed his eyes and slipped his hands deep into the front pockets of Dean's pants.

"I told you I'd find her," Dean said, breathing the words into Mal's panting mouth.

"I knew you would," Mal said; and maybe that was a lie, but it was one that Dean needed to hear, and one that Mal badly need to say.

They went up to the cockpit. Simon had settled Kaylee in the empty pilot's chair, and was kneeling by her side. She was running one hand through his hair. She looked up when they came in.

"Thank you," she said to Dean.

He shrugged. "Jayne helped," he said.

"I'm sure he did," Simon said, looking up at Jayne.

"Hey, I did!" Jayne said. "I found the right part in the Bible!"

"You, opening a Bible?" Zoe asked from the doorway. She crossed the room and took Kaylee's free hand in both of hers. "I'm glad you're safe," she said quietly.

"Good as new!" Kaylee said. She wasn't—Mal could see that easily; she looked exhausted and pale—but she would be, soon enough.

"Why don't you get her down to the infirmary, see if she's okay," he said to Simon. "Jayne, you help get her down there."

"Treatin' me like a pack mule," Jayne grumbled, but he hoisted Kaylee up, and she smacked at his shoulder, laughing.

"Everybody's back," River said.

"Right you are," Mal said. "How about you get us off this gorram planet before anything else happens? I've had enough excitement to last me the next ten years."

"No fucking kidding," Dean muttered.

Mal followed Dean into the kitchen, sat at the table and watched as Dean rummaged around in the cabinets.

"When's dinner," Dean said. "I'm starved."

"Who's gonna cook?" Mal asked. "Make something yourself."

"Do I look like a woman to you?" Dean asked.

Mal snorted. "Don't let Zoe hear you sayin' that."

"Zoe's no woman," Dean said. "She's a fuckin' Amazon."

Mal didn't understand the reference, but he was used to that, with Dean; he let it pass. "I owe you an apology."

Dean rubbed a hand over his face. "Can we not talk about this?"

"I should have trusted you," Mal said. "I didn't. I'm sorry."

"Yeah, okay, seriously, can we work on the not talking about this?"

"I'll never breathe another word about it," Mal said.

Dean heated up some soup on the stove and brought it over to the table. There was a bowl of oranges sitting on the table—bought by Zoe at the market the previous morning, before everything had happened. Dean sectioned one and ate it, licking the juice off his fingers.

"We had these on Earth," he said. "Not like the rest of this freaky space fruit."

"You miss it," Mal said.

Dean shrugged. "Probably always will."

"I'd like it if you stayed," Mal said. He reached over and took one of the orange slices.

Dean was quiet for a while. "If I find a way back," he said finally, "I can't promise you I won't try to go."

"That's fair," Mal said. He could live with uncertainty. Been doing it all his life.

"Okay then," Dean said, and smiled, unexpectedly, crooked and hopeful.

"Okay," Mal said. He ate another orange slice.

***

Mal came to Dean's quarters that night, after Dean was in bed with Dad's journal, tracing the familiar writing with his fingertips. Mal slid open the door and stood there, his shirt untucked and unbuttoned, hanging open.

Dean closed the journal and tossed it onto the floor. "What," he said.

Mal sat on the side of the bed and touched Dean's bare shoulder, the side of his neck. "Do you—"

"Yeah," Dean said, "yeah, okay."

Mal stood up to shuck off his clothes, lock the door, turn off the lights. Dean watched him move around the room: the strong line of his back, his firm ass. He palmed himself through his underwear, wanting.

Mal tugged the blankets off the bed and dropped them on the floor.

"It'll get cold," Dean said.

"So then you lean over and pick them up," Mal said, and got on the bed, rolled them until he was against the wall, pressed against Dean's back.

Dean closed his eyes. Mal nosed at the nape of his neck, kissed Dean's shoulder, touched his nipples and his hip, slid a hand into Dean's shorts. The darkness around them was warm, enclosing. Dean was content to lie there and let Mal touch him, to feel Mal's thighs against his own, Mal's cock pressing hard against his ass.

Mal pulled Dean's shorts down, tugging to get them off, and Dean kicked them down his legs and off the end of the mattress. The air in the room was cold, but Mal was a furnace against him, putting out more warmth than a fucking space heater.

"Are you—" Mal said.

"Yeah," Dean said. "Do it." He listened to Mal fumbling around in the dark, the sound of the cap coming off the lube.

He wasn't expecting three fingers, pressed into him with no warning, and his spine arched, his jaw clicked open. "Jesus," he said, reaching back to grab at Mal's wrist, "Mal, _Jesus_."

"Is it too much?" Mal murmured.

"No," Dean said. "No. _Jesus_."

Mal kissed the back of his neck and fucked him open, slowly, his fingers sliding deep and sure. Dean turned his face into the pillow and breathed.

"You ready?" Mal asked. He pulled his fingers out and put his hand on Dean's hip, tugging him back.

"Hurry," Dean said.

Mal came into him slowly—fuck, so goddamn slow, like he was waiting for something, only Dean didn't know what it was; and when Mal was all the way in, he just stopped there, his hips grinding in tiny circular movements, and not enough.

"Come _on_ ," Dean said, impatient, but Mal didn't listen—he fucked Dean like that, slow and sweet, the two of them lying there in the dark, and when Dean came, finally, it washed over him like the sea.

***

When Kaylee's baby was two months old, she was baptized at the monastery on Persephone, with her little white dress and her little white baby shoes.

"I still don't understand what the big fucking deal is," Dean muttered to Mal.

"You got me," Mal replied.

But they stood in the fancy chapel there, all dressed up in their nicest clothes—Jesus, Dean even wore a fucking _tie_ —and listened to some preacher say pretty words over the baby and spill some water on her forehead. Miriam didn't like that one bit, and she squalled like she thought the damn world was coming to an end.

"Why are we doing this, again?" Simon asked.

"Hey, it's your goddamn baby," Dean said; but Kaylee was smiling so wide that he'd probably do the whole thing again tomorrow, if she asked him to.

He went to the market, afterward, to buy something for Kaylee, and something for Mal for New Year's. He sucked at buying presents, but he'd done a lot of things in the past year that he'd thought he sucked at, so he might as well try this too.

The shop he went in had a display of antique guns, tucked away safe behind whatever the current version of plexiglass was called. Dean's eye caught on one in particular—what looked like a Desert Eagle, all beat up from use and years.

"How much is that one," he asked the shopkeeper, pointing.

"Now that's a priceless artifact," the man said. "You know about Earth-That-Was, boy?"

Dean bit his hangnail. "I heard some stories once," he said finally. "But that was a long time ago."

He bought a knife for Mal and some lacquered hair sticks for Kaylee, and a fucking dragon-shaped teether for the baby, because he'd lost his mind.

Outside, the sky had cleared after the morning snow, and women were busy shrieking at each other over stacks of sad-looking root vegetables. Dean bought some sweet potatoes; maybe he could convince Zoe to cook them up for dinner, with brown sugar and butter, just the way he liked them.

Mal was waiting for him in the cargo bay. "Where've you been? We're leavin' in an hour."

"Quit fussin' at me, I'm back now," Dean said, and smacked Mal's ass as he walked by.

"Time to go?" he heard River call, as he walked up the stairs toward the kitchen.

"Might as well," Mal answered. "We're all here."

\- THE END -  



End file.
